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Tuesday, November 7, 2000
I've been trying to make sense of narrative's place on the web
By Paul Ford
A resume of sorts -- proof that I'm not just making it all up.
1996: co-coordinator, Text21, a conference on the future of the written word held at Alfred University; several online short-story-plus-wacky-interfaces projects, including one where I scanned a dead insect in and made the parts of its body link to different stories, and home pages for fictional characters and a church; created, designed, New York Council for the Humanities web site and magazine presence
1997: the Subway Diary, a deliberate experiment in self-revelation, ritual, and chronology. Presentation to Columbia university master's program in telecommunications: "online self-publishing." Built 5 zillion web sites for big companies. Learned relational databases.
1998: Ftrain, an XML-based interlinked multimedia hypernarrative. Pioneered "Narrative Scoping" for corporate clients, where web sites are visualized as stories, and written as long, stories, where the user is the protagonist, befor construction.
1999-2000: Several generations of Ftrain, from flat text, to encoded text, to SQL-database + PHP3, finally settling on an XML-XSL-Perl-based, "self-investigating interlinked multimedia hypernarrative" with electro waffles and giant space bleemoes. Created "web narrative" strategies for scary companies.
2001: Novel writing, Ftrain development, pompous theorizing, going broke.
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