Seventy-five years into the digital era, much of our online communication is still rooted in the linear strictures of print. Browsers make us jump from tab to tab, thus obscuring a sense of the whole, including how the different bits are connected, all of which robs the “reader” of valuable context. With Tapestries people can create non-linear presentations that are more in synch with the way our re-wired brains are beginning to understand the world—as a multi-faceted assemblage of related ideas, letting authors dynamically explain how things are connected. Tapestries are not simply lists of links, requiring the user to click and go somewhere else. Rather they are an array of functional objects: each one visible and ready to be accessed and explored. You create a Tapestry by dragging digital objects—text, images, audio, video, software and entire web pages onto a blank infinite canvas. Size and placement is entirely up to the author. Tapestries can be displayed anywhere. Think of Tapestries as portable compound illustrations comprised of fully functional digital objects which can be embedded on any web page. Readers can comment on any part of a Tapestry or on the whole. Comments can be public or posted to a private group. For deeper collaboration, you can also invite other people to edit a Tapestry with you. If creators have given permission, readers can make their own editable copies and remake them as they please.

Lunch at 11:45 a.m. for in-person attendees

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About the Speaker

 

I got bit by the electronic publishing bug in 1979 and haven't looked back since.  For the first 15 years, I worked on expanding the notion of the page to include rich media. The two companies i founded, Criterion and Voyager, managed a lot of firsts—the first films with commentary tracks and supplementary sections; what is widely regarded as the first commercially viable CD-rom, The CD Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, referenced in Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations and referred to by Alan Kay as "the first piece of digital "content" worth criticizing"; and the first electronic books—Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Trilogy and Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice in 1992.  After that there were a bunch of years spent on tool making and in 2004 the Macarthur Foundation gave me a five-year grant to explore the evolution of publishing in the digital era. With that grant i started the Institute for the Future of the Book where my colleagues and I started investigating what happens when you place text in a browser with a dynamic margin. The upshot of this work was SocialBook, Inc. a company focused on the evolution of "reading" from a solitary to a social experience. Currently I'm leading, The Tapestry Project—an ambitious effort to develop a non-linear authoring environment—think HyperCard thirty years on—in conjunction with Stanford (where my archives are) and the Internet Archive.

—Bob Stein