Notebook of Sand

• Recent Publications
• Recent Projects
• Conferences & Speaking
"Comparing Spatial Hypertext Collections"
  ACM Hypertext '09
"Archiving and Sharing Your Tinderbox"
  Tinderbox Weekend London '09
"The Electronic Nature of Future Literatures"
  Literary Studies Now, Apr '09
"The World University Project"
  St. John's Col. Cambridge, Feb '09
"Ethical Explanations,"
  The New Knowledge Forge, Jun '08
Lecture, Cambridge University
  Tragedy in E-Lit, Nov '07
Hypertext '07: Tragedy in E-Lit
Host for Tinderbox Cambridge '07
Keynote: Dickinson State Uni Conf
Upper Midwest NCHC'07: Speaker
eNarrative 6: Creative Nonfiction
HT'05: "Philadelphia Fullerine"
  Nelson award winning paper
NCHC '05:
 Nurturing Independent Scholarship
Riddick Practicum:
  Building Meeting Good Will
NCHC '04:
  Philadelphia Fullerine
  Lecture on American Studies
WWW@10: Nonfiction on the Web
NCHC '03: Parliamentary Procedure
ELL '03 -- Gawain Superstar
• (a)Musing (ad)Dictions:

Ideas. Tools. Art. Build --not buy. What works, what doesn't. Enjoy new media and software aesthetics at Tekka.

Theodore Gray (The Magic Black Box)

Faith, Life, Art, Academics. Sermons from my family away from home: Eden Chapel!

My other home: The Cambridge Union Society (in 2007, I designed our [Fresher's Guide])

The Economist daily news analysis

Global Higher Ed blog

• Hypertext/Writing

Writing the Living Web

Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems, hypertext expert Mark Bernstein. (Electronic) Literature, cooking, art, etc.

Fabulous game reviews at playthisthing.

• Stats

Chapter I: Born. Lived. Died.

There is a Chapter II.

Locale: Lancaster County Pa, USA

Lineage: Guatemala

Religion: My faith is the primary focus of my life, influencing each part of me. I have been forgiven, cleansed, and empowered by Jesus Christ. Without him, I am a very thoughtful, competent idiot. With him, I am all I need to be, all I could ever hope for. I oppose institutional religious stagnation, but getting together with others is a good idea. God is real. Jesus Christ is his Son, and the Bible is true. Faith is not human effort. It's human choice. I try to be the most listening, understanding, and generous person I can.

Interests: Anything I can learn. Training and experience in new media, computer science, anglophone literature, education, parliamentary debate, democratic procedure, sculpture, and trumpet performance. Next: applied & computational linguistics, probably.

Education: Private school K-3. Home educated 4-12. Graduated Summa Cum Laude from Elizabethtown College in Jan 2006. As the 2006 Davies-Jackson Scholar, I studied English at St. John's College, Cambridge University from 2006 - 2008.

Memberships: Eden Baptist, Cambridge Union Society, ACM, AIP, GPA.

Alum of the Elizabethtown College Honors Program, sponsored by the Hershey Company.

The Ethics of Hyperlinking Direct Quotes
Sunday, 23 May 2004 :-:

Has anyone thought about the ethical issues involved in transferring a text from some other media (spoken conversation, print, radio, tv) and turning it into a hypertext?

Hyperlinking a quote manipulates the context of words. For example, here's a quote from a recent Wired News article on biotech patents. First, the quote as it appears in the article itself.

"Our original intent was to not allow the patenting of higher life forms," said Nadege Adams, a spokeswoman for the Council of Canadians. "This was lost today. The Supreme Court said you don't have to patent the higher life form, just the gene, and you have control over the whole organism."

Most usually, we create hyperlinks on the level of raw information. This is the natural blog-type link. Since we usually don't have the benefit of link-types or link meta information (hover boxes are sometimes useful here), we can't describe the nature of a link well on the Web. So most links degrade to the following the basic level of direct informational correlation:

"Our original intent was to not allow the patenting of higher life forms," said Nadege Adams, a spokeswoman for the Council of Canadians. "This was lost today. The Supreme Court said you don't have to patent the higher life form, just the gene, and you have control over the whole organism."

I could hyperlink this same paragraph a few different ways as well. For example, I could decide to be opposed to Monsanto, the company who is trying to control their genetic intellectual property and all products of their intellectual effort.

"Our original intent was to not allow the patenting of higher life forms," said Nadege Adams, a spokeswoman for the Council of Canadians. "This was lost today. The Supreme Court said you don't have to patent the higher life form, just the gene, and you have control over the whole organism."

I could link a million ways, each framing the quote in a different way. When including someone else's words, how should we quote things? At what point can we be accused of taking the words out of context, or of creating a new context? This may not necessarily be bad, but it's good to know when that line has been crossed.

My thought is that basic informational linking to directly related sources within a quote should be ok. I'm not sure beyond that. It will take some time to think through.

Why do I bring this up? I'm going to be working with a lot of direct quotes the next few weeks, and I want to do things as thoughtfully, as ethically as possible.