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.

Tinderbox: internal anchor equivalents
Saturday, 8 May 2004 :-:

For a while, I've been struggling with a way to accomplish the equivalent of HTML anchor links between Tinderbox notes. If I have a large document and I want to link to a particular paragraph from a particular paragraph, I thought, I can't do it. I was disappointed with Tinderbox's lack of a key hypertext feature.

Then I figured it out. It might, of course, be a kluge, but I think not. See, I was deceived by the idea of link direction. I forgot my database experience. How do you do a many-many link in a relational database? You need intermediate data.

Now, if I want to directly link two bits of text that are part of two notes, I first highlight the text. Then I hit the *, which links to a new note from the highlighted text. Then, I highlight the link text from the second note and link it to the new, third note I just created.

Voila! It takes an extra step to traverse between texts, which might be annoying, but then it might not. It actually seems like an elegant way to deal with it. This way, complex means aren't needed to set where the anchor points to. The basic link works perfectly well, since we can backtrack links in Tinderbox. The extra note also gives us a place to include a detailed explanation of the link.

I have used this numerous times in my draft of the comparison between Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Since I have the full text of Heart of Darkness in the Tinderbox file, I can use this to directly link my citations to the text. I can also use this to demonstrate the argument flow within a single note, linking parts of the main text to other parts of the main text.

These links don't have to be one-way either. Their topology can become complex. If I cite an idea in several places, I can have this jumping-off note be pointed to from all over the place.

The trick is direction. Rather than having the central note point to other notes, all the cross-references point inward to this central linking note. If you want to link to a specific spot in a note, think backwards. This way we encode the location in the document where the reference is made.

Brilliant. I doubt Eastgate did this by accident.