• 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.
Skills: Everything I can learn. Primary focus: Writing. Trumpet (since age 8), Parliamentary Procedure, classical guitar (since age 20), juggling, stage/coin magic, road cycling, hypertext, computer programming, electronic document processing, system administration, GNU/Linux, photography, graphics design, historical research, balsa aircraft building. Public speaking etc.
Interests: I am a polymath, therefore: anything I can learn. Current primary focus: writing, and thus everything else. Recycling, road cycling, nonfiction reading, classic movies, hypertext, computers, Software Freedom, language, art, photography, cartography, biography, ecology, science, psychology, law, government, politics (but not mindless insanity), philosophy, history, pedagogy, music, culture, sculpture. If it's learnable, I'm so there.
When possible, I like to integrate these things.
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 go up to St. John's College, Cambridge University to read English in Oct 2006.
Alum of the Elizabethtown College Honors Program, sponsored by the Hershey Company.
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Tragedy in Electronic Literature
Friday, 21 Dec 2007 :-:
On 5 Nov this year, I gave lecture within the English Tripos to the undergraduates at Cambridge. Slides, audio/video, and lecture notes for " Tragedy in Electronic Literature" are now online. ( please use the YouTube links when possible to save bandwidth)
This lecture site was available to students over a WIFI connection during the lecture. They could use it to look at the examples more closely, read supplementary material, and view the slides. The WIFI network was limited solely to the material I provided, since I didn't want attention to wander. I was very, very pleased when student questions combined material from the lecture notes/site with things I had said in the lecture. The site was built in Tinderbox, published with the Spatial Hypertext Publisher I recently built.
In the lecture space, I also set up several computers with examples, so people could try them out, but students were far more interested in talking than looking. Professor Poole and I were a bit disappointed at this, but in retrospect, it's nothing to be disappointed about. We can hardly complain that a cluster of students stayed to talk afterward until the building closed.
The lecture's basic question is this: if electronic literature empowers characters and tragedy disempowers them, how is tragedy possible in electronic literature?
I owe thanks to many of people for this:
- Adrian Poole sponsored and supervised the lecture. His own interesting lectures and our consequent discussion on tragedy have been fascinating. His encouragement and confidence have been inspiring.
- Mark Bernstein first encouraged me to organise a panel at Hypertext 07 on Tragedy and Hypertext. He has, in general, been a great encourager over the years.
- Nick Lowe, Kieron O'Hara, David Millard, and Emily Short, who spoke at the conference panel. I owe a lot of ideas to this discussion.
- I am particularly indebted to Nick Lowe for his interesting book The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative, and to Emily, for her thorough review and fascinating description of tragedy-related Interactive Fictions.
- Clare Hooper, who got me to think about literary hypertext in the first place, whose enthusiasm refuses to be blunted, and who co-organised the ACM panel.
- Sarah Smith, who shared examples and ideas about tragic hypertext .oO(and for the unforgettable line: how many female Shakespeares does your play have? Ours has two)
I am now working on a related issue: moral dilemmas in interactive fiction, which is proving to be very interesting.
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