2003-08-28

Publishing evolving recombinant metadocuments
http://www.ht03.org/papers/pdfs/14.pdf


Abstract from http://www.ht03.org/papers/
"Metadocuments are documents that consist primarily of references to other
documents. Our active browsing web visualization tool generates an evolving
series of navigable metadocument snapshots over time. It conducts
expression-directed automatic retrieval of information from the web. The
granularity of browsing is shifted from documents to the finer grained
information elements, which are metadocument constituents. While the user can
engage in direct manipulation expressions of interest and design, the program
performs procedural visual composition of the information elements to form
spatial hypertext. As prior versions of the tool lacked the save/load
capability, they were entirely process-oriented. The metadocuments existed only
as transient states. This paper is an early report on our new metadocument
authoring and publishing capability, and some of its potential uses. Saved
metadocuments can be published on the web. Once published, they can serve both
as static navigable metadocuments, and as the jumping off point for further
evolutionary browsing of the information space represented by the collected
elements."


granularity of browsing

interesting in granularity which is *smaller* than the web page (as opposed to
compound document):
the information element


also
granularity of collections
...this gets messy. the bookmarks menu list is a nasty *big* list of images,
bits of text, etc


the information space is:

collection of 1st class information elements (bits of text, imaging)

metadocument = force of collection

navigation hypertext


historical context:

found objects = readymades (cf Marcel Duchump 'Fountain, 1917' recontextualises
a urinal by reusing its information content)

choosing/collecting... this is a creative act that epitomises the information
age


[this is all very weblogs btw. the same way the phil of info paper i read
underpins wikis but doesn't mention them]


the collection is an *active assemblage* -- info elements plus navigation

a montage, re-presenting, re-cognizing


it's generative too

"combinformation" is their demo
http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/ecology/collageMachine/

recombinant information space

[the demo's a bit weird. it's good to have a canvas to collect active info
elements, and the philosophical underpinning is sound - there are a lot of
references to (binding) artists, semiotics etc - but i don't think this is
going to be the main interface... although i guess it's not meant to be.]

[was good though!]

[*again* this is all about how to emulate roads in a room-based hypertext. a
place with intrinsic distance that can contextualise a number of things -- this
is because we lack decent mechanisms for contextualising and navigating on
arbitrary but *defined* dimensions on the web. links on the www are just binary
relations. we're reaching to this with weblogs, which are a collection of a
different kind, a dimension of a sort, wikis in a different way, trackback in
another... but simultaneously we're limited by (a) the www, (b) how we think
the real world works, (c) the limitations of the real world. ... what we should
be doing is looks what we do with the real world given what we+RL affords us,
what we're doing on the www in a similar way, what we're *aspiring* to do on
the www and what that really means, and then build a system which allows all of
that. so, we want context, we want dimensions, link overlays, supersenses, to
fragment meaning, to bring fragments together. etc etc. more later...]