Electronic Literature Authoring Software

Since the early days of the public Internet, there have been works of art and literature created in social networking environments, and there have been short exchanges of cultural dialog on Internet Relay Chat. Twitter, created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, has brought to a wider audience, the opportunity to communicate in a way that is inherently literate -- asking the writer to confine his or her thoughts to 140 characters, a process that takes editing and teaches epigrammatic expression and the ability to convey meaning and layers of meaning in a few words. Twitter also challenges writers and artists to create performative or collaboratively performative works in a medium where the audience can be an intimate circle of friends, an art audience, or even a diverse global audience. This month Authoring Software introduces a new "tools" page on Twitter. It includes pointers to the work of three new media writers -- Jay Bushman, Dene Grigar and Mez -- who have created works using Twitter and have written about these works on Authoring Software. It also features links to articles, documentation, and works that range from CreativeTime Tweets to Mahabharata on Twitter -- A Narrative Experiment and were created by new media writers and artists including Man Bartlett, Joseph DeLappe, Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery, and An Xiao. Visit the new Twitter page to find out more.

Authoring Software Looks at Interface Issues and Design

The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort

The Humane Interface by Computer Scientist and Musician Jef Raskin

The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, edited by theater and computers scholar and researcher Brenda Laurel

The New Media Reader,
edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort

The development of interface -- the words, graphics, audio, interaction, and other interface components that connect the reader with computer applications, including narrative and or poetic applications -- is intertwined with contemporary computer history and is an integral part of the history of new media. And computer-mediated creation in the arts and humanities has been directly and indirectly informed by innovators of computer hardware and computer software, by information scientists and futurists, as well as by the many musicians, artists, and writers who have contributed to shaping the field. We are, in a certain sense in the place of medieval and early Renaissance "theory composers", such as Guido of Arezzo and Marchetto da Padova, who struggled with the creation of notated music in eras when it was not even completely clear how the notes would be represented. In these times, literary structures were studied by musicians and even influenced in their works. [1] Now, creating new literary structures, we look to the histories of computer-mediated information. (and may even come full circle by studying musical structures)

Exploring interface development and in particular narrative and poetic uses of interface in new media literature in a continuing series on interface issues, Authoring Software looks at an important compendium for students and teachers of new media writing practice: The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)

A valuable collection of source documents -- presenting over 50 points of view of new media history in one volume and including a CD of seminal works -- The New Media Reader forges an original path through the contemporary history of new media up to the development of the World Wide Web. Introductory statements by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich and commentary throughout by the editors, introduce a collection of essays that range from Donna Haraway's influential A Cyborg Manifesto, to an historic introduction to the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, Ari Loutonen, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, and Arthur Secret.

" The playful construction within constraints that the Oulipo defined as the role of the author can become an activity extended to readers, who can take place in the interpretation, configuration, and construction of texts."

From the point of view of writing that predated computer-mediated writing but experimented with proto-interface structures in print works, Six Selections by the Oulipo is one of the most interesting sections in The New Media Reader.

Founded in France in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, the group's name is an acronym of Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, roughly translated: "workshop of potential literature". Setting the stage for the flowering of French works of digital literature in the 1980's when writers, including Jean-Pierre Balpe and Philippe Bootz, among many others, created works that were actually implemented on computers, Oulipo poets and writers experimented with the very structure of literature, using print and experimental artist book formats. Their writing is particularly interesting in that their strategies in print foresee reader interaction with literature and provide an interesting look at literary systems now implemented by authoring software. "The potential that lies within such an understanding of interactive experiences is a reconfiguration of the relationship between reader, author, and text," Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin write in their introduction to the Oulipo. "The playful construction within constraints that the Oulipo defined as the role of the author can become an activity extended to readers, who can take place in the interpretation, configuration, and construction of texts."

Six Selections by the Oulipo begins with Raymond Queneau's One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems for which he wrote a series of sonnets -- 14 lines of structured poetry -- which are composed so that they can be combined in many different ways and are laid out so that lines can be cut put to reveal a very large number of different poems.

The anticipation or the foresight to see how such an approach might be taken are at the core of the migration of experimental writing from print to new media. Queneau clearly saw this, not only in One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems but also -- running at the bottom of a series of pages in The New Media Writer -- in his Yours for the Telling in which the adventure story interface of branching paths is anticipated: "Would you prefer the tale of the three, tall lanky beanpoles if so go to 16 if not go to 3."

Following One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, French poet Jean Lescure's "Brief History of the Oulipo" winds in an and out of the history and goals of the group in a diffuse poetic essay that itself reflects the qualities of the work of this group of poets and writers (of which Lescure was a member) and for whom literary history, the literary qualities of experimental literature. and an exploration/discovery of structure were core as was multiplicity of meanings -- "In short, every literary text is literary because of an indefinite quantity of potential meanings" he states.

Other documents in this section of The New Media Reader include:

Mathematician/writer Claude Berge's "For a Potential Analysis of Combinatory Literature",
which begins with forerunners of now computer-mediated strategies in the humanities, such as Mozart's "Musical Game" that allowed people to compose variations on one of his works by combining a series of musical phrases. Berge then displays a -- particularly interesting from an interface point of view -- creative series of systems analysis graphs of literary works with experimental structures, including the work of Queneau and Raymond Roussel, as well as many other approaches that can be expressed with mathematical diagramming. The graphs themselves -- although in the spirit of Oulipo how they might be created differently could be considered -- are of interest to writers of new media literature, who sometimes struggle with ways to map out the structures of their works.

"Computer and Writer: The Centre Pompidou Experiment"
in which French poet, publisher, and diplomat Paul Fournel discusses a series of early experiments -- by Dominique Bourguet, Jean-Pierre Enard and Paul Fournel, and Jean-Pierre Balpe, among others -- both in creating computer-mediated works and in translating works, such Raymond Queneau's, into various kinds of computer-mediated poetry and/or narrative generators.

Italo Calvino was also a member of Oulipo and is represented in this section by Prose and Anticombinatorics, a narrative with programmic solutions to a murder mystery.

In addition to Oulipo, experimental writers in print whose work is featured in The New Media Reader include Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs writing on "The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin", and Augusto Boal.

" On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk."

In a series of documents that review the contributions of information science futurists, The New Media Reader documents the history of contemporary creative organization of information with papers by Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, Theodor H. Nelson, and Douglas Engelbart, among many others.

Many new media artists and writers created their work on separate but parallel tracks. Nevertheless, these papers are of continual interest --not only historically [2] but also in formulating insights and ideas for future directions in the field.

For instance, in 1945, observing that the human mind "operates by association", in his futurist paper "As We May Think", originally published in The Atlantic Monthly and reprinted in The New Media Reader, World War II Director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush asks readers to:

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk."

In the following years, information specialists, such as Henriette Davidson Avram and Ralph H. Parker and many others, both designed and created vast systems of searchable computerized library catalogs that are seldom fully credited. These systems were the backbone from which branched (or were created on separate parallel paths) innovative uses of computerized full text information systems on which The New Media Reader focuses, such as the Evolutionary List File (ELF) system proposed in Ted Nelson's classic paper, "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" (1965) in which Nelson quotes Vannevar Bush's definition of the memex, addresses the problems of organizing and accessing personal and scholarly information of scholars, and suggests an ELF system using a database based on entries, links, and lists. He coins the word hypertext and imagines full text information systems as containing not only words but also images and film. A primary use of his ELF system is scholarly writing, but he envisions other possibilities.

Also of interest in The New Media Reader is Douglas Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, as well as classic source documents in computer and information science history that include Ivan Sutherland's "Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System"; Richard Stallman's "The GNU Manifesto"; Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg's "Personal Dynamic Media"; and Stuart Moulthrop's "You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media".

" It is our hope that all courses in which The New Media Reader plays a role will include serious study of the digital objects presented here-or of other artifacts, online and off, that don't lend themselves to being reproduced on the printed page. New media cannot be grasped by only consulting secondary sources and critical writing, however important such perspectives may be. Whether our goals include insightful analysis or meaningful new creation, our work should be grounded in interaction with specific new media creations -- as surely as those interested in literature should read literary works, as much as those interested in cinema should watch films."
Web Preface and Guide to the CD - Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Outside of Eastgate's continuing work in publishing hypertext literature and the Electronic Literature Organization's work in this area, early works of new media literature are not always easy to locate or to run.

Thus, it is important that (although some selections require applications that may not be available to every reader) the CD that accompanies The New Media Reader contains a notable collection of interesting selections of pre-World Wide Web new media writing and games, beginning (as regards games and works of art) with Stephen Russell's legendary Spacewar! and also including Gregory Yob's Hunt the Wumpus, Adventure, Jim Rosenberg's Diagram Series 3 and 4, Judy Malloy's collaborative literary system, You!, Robert Kendall's The Clue, poems by John Cayley, and Writing on the Hypertextual Edge, edited by Stuart Moulthrop, a section of the Spring 1001 issue of Writing on the Edge, which includes Izme Pass by Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry, as well as Michael Joyce's WOE.

" What McCloud's work nevertheless shows is that new forms, even those that have not been studied seriously for centuries or even decades, do indeed have certain conventions and rules, and that if the form being studied is considered with care and thought, these rules can be determined, benefitting those who work in the form, who are striving to improve the practice of their art."
-- Nick Montfort

As regards the creation of interface, The New Media Reader is particularly useful to new media writers in presenting an overall picture of historic approaches. The book also reprints quite a few papers that are specifically helpful to designers of interfaces for new media literature. They include:

Richard A. Bolt, "'Put-That-There': Voice and Gesture at the Graphics Interface"

Lucy A. Suchman, two excerpts from her book Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-machine Communication
The first addresses navigation -- as an example of different approaches, contrasting European style navigation, which begins with a plan, with Trukese navigation which begins with an objective; the second addresses interactivity, which she approaches from a anthropology/sociology point of view that might inspire conceptions of how narrative can be differently considered for "interactive artifacts".

Scott McCloud's "Time Frames" (from his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art)

Brenda Laurel, "The Six Elements and Causal Relations Among Them" (from her book Computers as Theater) and "Star Raiders: Dramatic Interaction in a Small World" (from her PhD thesis)

J. David Bolter, from his book Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, a selection entitled "Seeing and Writing", which looks at the visual aspects of the "Electronic Page."

Additionally, The New Media Reader hosts a series of papers that look at creative new media in learning environments. For instance telemative narrative pioneer Roy Ascott is represented with "The Construction of Change", an essay with a central focus on an education of artists that includes cybernetics. And Michael Joyce's "Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts" focuses on classroom uses of StorySpace and hypertext.

More information about , The New Media Reader is available on the MIT Press website at http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=9604

and on the book's website at http://www.newmediareader.com/index.html

The Table of Contents is listed at http://www.newmediareader.com/book_contents.html

The CD Table of Contents is listed at
http://www.newmediareader.com/cd_contents.html

reviewed by Judy Malloy

Notes

[1] F. Alberto Gallo, Music of the Middle Ages II, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985. (translated by Karen Eales) pp. 1-13

[2] Books on the development of the personal computer are a recommended supplement to The New Media Reader. Although it is now taken for granted, creators who used punchcards and mainframe computers in the 1960's and earlier (I worked for a contractor of the Goddard Space Center Libraries computer catalog in 1967 and later headed the team that designed and programmed the Ball Brothers Research Corporation Library computerized catalog in 1969) know how important the work of Gary Kildall, Ed Roberts, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Xerox PARC, Lee Felsenstein, Don Estridge, (as well as many others, such as Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay, whose work is included in The New Media Reader) did to invent and produce the personal computer systems we use to create contemporary new media art.

Also recommended as supplemental source material are publications about seminal art telecom systems, such as Heidi Grundmann, Editor, Art Telecommunication, Vancouver, Canada: Western Front; Wien, Austria: Blix, 1984 and Roy Ascott and Carl Eugene Loeffler, Guest Editors, Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications, Leonardo 24:2, 1991.

Commentary - Interface Issues:
Jef Raskin: The Humane Interface

A leading force in the conception and creation of the Macintosh project for Apple, computer scientist and musician Jef Raskin, (1943-2005) who conducted the San Francisco Chamber Opera Society and played the organ, was an apostle for the design of "humane" interactive user interfaces. Raskin believed that user interface -- the way the user communicates with the computer -- should be at the core of the design of computers of the future.

His influential book, The Humane Interface, New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems, (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2000) is a combination of technical and approachable. Merging interface anecdotes and wisdom with detailed information on program design, such as the design of search applications, The Humane Interface is a useful resource for new media writers who create work that situates poetry, narrative, and visual elements in the context of interface design.

Raskin expresses interface strategies that are seemingly simple yet are important. For instance, in discussing the need to consider the role of memory in interface design, he cautions that you can't assume that the user will remember what he or she has seen previously -- a familiar problem for every writer who works with the issue of how the reader will remember the revealed details of character and place. Indeed, questions considered in many of Raskin's discussions -- how the user remembers the interface, what he or she has to do to produce more text, how navigation strategies path the reader -- are of primary interest in the creation of new media literature.

Among the issues the book addresses are:

Visibility versus invisibility -- basically, if you can always see an interface device, it is visible. if you have to remember how to find and use it, it is invisible.

Monotony -- whether or not different ways of doing the same thing are incorporated into the interface

The time it takes for the user to understand the work

Taking into account "habit formation" -- ie wouldn't it be better to give the user a way to undo mistaken commands, rather than asking such questions as "are you sure you want to...", which may be habitually answered "yes".

These issues may not always be important in a work of new media literature, and in some e-literature, either the subverting of such principles underlies the poetics or the revealing of the interface or what the interface reveals contributes to the narrative tension. Thus interface maxims can serve to bring clarity to the issues of interface design while at the same time (to a new media writer) they suggest literary strategies. For instance, the observation that the reader absorbs the workings of the interface at the beginning of the work and then assumes that he or she will always be confronted with it, might be used in one way when narrative flow is important, but in some instances, a new media writer might wish to alter the interface to differentiate time frames or characters.

In the Chapter on "Navigation and Other Aspects of Humane Interfaces", Raskin discusses "intuitive" and "natural" interfaces. Noting that "intuitive" tends to be defined by what the user is used to, he uses as an example Star Trek IV when the former officers of the Enterprise are transported to the 20th century. In one the incident, Scotty picks up the mouse of a Macintosh computer and attempts to operate the computer by speaking into the mouse. "Computer..."

Because what the user is accustomed to now drives interface design for many computer systems, Raskin also observes that designing for natural and intuitive interfaces can be detrimental, i.e. there is a conflict between creating something that actually works better and creating something that the user is accustomed to.

The author's attitude to icons may not be well received by visual artists. Nevertheless his question -- wouldn't it be easier to use words than trying to guess or reveal what each little symbol means? -- has some resonance for contemporary desktops, and he provides colorful examples of how icons can be misinterpreted.

Given its computer science basis, the book may not be of use to all new media writers. Nevertheless it is of interest to see how a seminal figure in interface design looks at interface design. His discussion of programming environments, in which he emphasizes the role of documentation in programming creation, is of interest to the contemporary field of literate programming. (Chapter 7 - "Interface Issues Outside the User Interface") And all of Jef Raskin's points serve to remind new media artists and writers of the importance of interface.

"An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human fragilities," he writes. "If you want to create a humane interface, you must have an understanding of the relevant information on how both humans and machines operate. In addition you must cultivate in yourself sensitivity to the difficulties that people experience."

Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface, New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems, is available from Amazon

reviewed by Judy Malloy

Commentary - Interface Issues:
The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design,
A Classic Interface Design Textbook, edited by Brenda Laurel

Interface -- the way the reader (the "user" in computer technology) communicates with the work -- is a primary concern for creators of electronic literature, as well as for readers who want to adventure into new media fiction and poetry. Writers and artists may choose to subvert the principles of interface design, striving in some cases to challenge the reader, or making the interface an actual part of the work. For instance, the interface design principle of "least surprises" might be important in a work of literature in which the content of the text is most important. On the other hand, surprises might be an integral component for writers and artists who design the interface as an integral part of the work itself, rather than as a way of accessing an underlying work. But it is of interest to understand the principles of interface design, whether we choose to use or subvert them.

This month, Authoring Software begins a series of commentaries on interface issues. The commentaries will be created in a modular fashion, so that short essays on the subject will eventually be combined in both sequential and hypertextual ways, creating an in depth look at interface design for new media writers. We begin with a classic text: The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, edited by Brenda Laurel. (Addison-Wesley, 1990)

The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design is classic work of Macintosh Interface design. Edited by theater and computers scholar and researcher Brenda Laurel, who was at the time a consultant to Apple Computer and later created Purple Moon software for girls, the book is a formative documentation of the time in history when personal computers were beginning to make new ways of reading and writing possible. Some chapters are probably too Macintosh interface specific to be of interest to all new media writers. Yet the book is very useful. not only from the point of view of historical interface design but also from the point of view of classic approaches to creating interfaces.

For instance, the uses of conversation in interface design -- in particular the simulation of human/human conversation, as opposed to human/computer interaction that does not take this into account -- is addressed by Susan F. Brennan in "Conversation as Direct Manipulation, an Iconoclastic View". Her chapter includes a series of useful examples and discusses how they can be enhanced with graphics.

In "Interface Agents: Metaphors with Character", Brenda Laurel talks about the creation of character in terms of personifying interfaces, using characters in the theatrical sense. Her approach is designed mainly for the creation of interfaces for practical applications, and the interface device of personified "agents" that assist computer users has not become as widely used as anticipated -- perhaps because our relationships with our computers are one-on-one and we may not desire an intermediary, something that was not anticipated in the age of transition from impersonal mainframe to personal computer. Nevertheless, for new media writers who are interested in the traditional literary use of fictional characters as interpreter of events, how this concept was translated into ideas of computer interface agents and guides is of interest in the creation of electronic literature.

In "Guides: Characterizing the Interface", Tim Oren, Gitta Salomon, Kristie Kreitman, and Abbe Don discuss designing an interface for Grolier Electronic Publishing's The Americana Series: America 1800-1850. Fictional characters, represented by graphic images, were used to help young readers select the material most appropriate to their interests. "We are finding out as much about the way people want to receive content as we are about navigation," the authors note. "We have uncovered a lot about what engages in the interface, but we have also discovered that the interface is deeply intermeshed with the content."

Other chapters of particular interest include:

Ronald Baecker and Ian Small, "Animation at the Interface"

Chris Crawford, "Lessons from Computer Game Design"

Abbe Don, "Narrative and the Interface"

Myron W. Kruger, "Videoplace and the Interface of the Future"

S.Joy Mountford and William W. Gaver, "Talking and Listening to Computers"

Michael Naimark, "Realness and Interactivity"

Theodor Holm Nelson, "The Right Way to Think About Software Design"

Tim Oren, "Designing a New Medium"

Howard Rheingold, "What's the Big Deal about Cyberspace?"

Gitta Salomon, "New Uses for Color"

Rob Swigart, "A Writer's Desktop"

"If it is to be like magical paper, then it is the magical part that is all important and that must be most strongly attended to in the user interface design," Alan Kay writes about the computer screen in his chapter "User Interface: A Personal View". Kay also looks at Marshall McLuhan's ideas on how the printing press changed the thought patterns of those who learned to read, observing that "What McLuhan was really saying was that if the personal computer is a truly new medium then the very use of it would actually change the thought patterns of an entire civilization."

Brenda Laurel is currently Chair for the Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design was conceived of and technically supported by interface designer S. Joy Mountford and is available from Amazon

reviewed by Judy Malloy

Guide to Authoring Software Tools and Applications

HTML, DHTML, Java

Writers Who Use HTML, DHTML, Java, JavaScript

HTML, DHTML, JavaScript,
CSS, PHP
__J. R. Carpenter
__Judy Malloy
__Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland
__Judd Morrissey
__Alexander Mouton
__Ian Hatcher
__Nanette Wylde

Microsoft Marquee
__William Harris

Website Authoring

Writers Who Use Website Authoring Tools

Aptana Studio
__Ian Hatcher

Trellix
__Deena Larsen>

Dreamweaver
__Mark Amerika>
__Regina Pinto
__Joel Weishaus>

Drupal
__Judd Morrissey

iWeb
__Dylan Harris

Netvibes
__Kate Pullinger

Rich Internet Applications

Writers Who Use Rich Internet Applications

Flash
__Mark Amerika
__Alan Bigelow
__Chris Joseph
__Rob Kendall
__Donna Leishman
__Alexander Mouton
__Regina Pinto
__Stephanie Strickland,
Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo>
__Stuart Moulthrop>
__Nanette Wylde

Hypertext Authoring

Writers Who Use Hypertext Authoring

Experimental
__Ian Hatcher
__Rob Kendall
__Judy Malloy>
__Nick Montfort
__Jim Rosenberg>

Storyspace
__Steve Ersinghaus
__Susan M. Gibb

Literatronica
__Mark Marino

Eliterature Authoring

Writers Who Use MidiPoet

__Eugenio Tisselli
__Chris Funkhouser

Processing

Processing

Writers Who Use Processing

__Scott Rettberg

Interactive Fiction, Adventure Game Authoring, Game Authoring

Interactive Fiction Wiki

Writers Who Use IF Tools

__Aaron A. Reed
__Andrew Plotkin

now have their own page at poetry_generators.html

Personal Media Tools

Cave Writing

Writers Who Use Cave Writing

__Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Augmented Reality

Snapdragon

Writers Who Use Augmented Reality

__Caitlin Fisher

Other Applications

StoryKit
a mobile interface that uses multi-modal
media-capture tools to support the creation
of multimedia stories on an iPhone/iPod
Touch.
ToolBook

Writers Who Use Other applications

ToolBook

__M.D. Coverley

Other Programming Languages and Developer Tools

Writers Who Use Other Languages, Developer Tools

C++
__Adriene Jenik

MySQL
__Judd Morrissey

Perl
__Nanette Wylde

Python; Vim
__J. R. Carpenter
__Ethan Miller
__Nick Montfort

Squeak
__Jim Rosenberg

XML
__Rob Kendall

Web Information Management

Writers Who Use Web Information Management

Diigo
__ Mark Marino

Blog and Forum Applications

Writers Who Use Blog Applications

CommentPress
__Kate Pullinger

Originally begun as a multi-user "adventure" program by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex in England, MUDs (Multi-user Dungeons) and the subsequent MOOs (MUD's object oriented) are text-based, programmable virtual communities that connect many users to the same place at the same time. In addition to creative social interaction, LambdaMoo, created by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC, also fostered virtual world building and allowed for a variety of narrative structures. Participants who "enter" MOO environments are usually textually "visible" to each other, and they share a database of "objects" such as "rooms" and "exits". MOOS have been used as meeting places, for distance learning, to create text for performative works, and to create hypertextual and/or interactive fiction narratives and/or virtual locative narratives that many readers can simultaneously explore. Authoring Software continues its series of resources with a new page on MUDs and MOOs. Visit MUDs and MOOs page for complete information.

Visual and Video Applications

Adobe

Audio Applications

Writers Who Use Visual, Video, and Audio Applications

Photoshop
__Mark Amerika
__Alan Bigelow
__Chris Joseph
__Alexander Mouton
__Regina Pinto
__Joel Weishaus

Studio Artist
__Dylan Harris

Director
__Jim Andrews
__M.D. Coverley
__Stephanie Strickland,
Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo

Apple Final Cut
__Nanette Wylde

Apple QuickTime
__Mark Amerika
__J. R. Carpenter

Apple iMovie
__Mark Amerika

Premiere
__Chris Joseph

Soundium
__Stefan Muller Arisona

Audio Applications

Apple Logic Studio
__Alexander Mouton

Max/MSP/Jitter
__Antoinette LaFarge

Sound Studio
__Alan Bigelow

Sound Forge
__Dylan Harris
__Donna Leishman
__Chris Joseph
__Regina Pinto

New Media Preservation Issues

Archiving the Avant Garde: Documenting and Preserving Digital/Media Art, A Consortium Project of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Cleveland Performance Art Festival and Archive, Franklin Furnace Archive, and Rhizome.org

Library of Congress
Digital Preservation

Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin
"Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature" The Electronic Literature Organization, June 14, 2004