Two good articles from Kendall Grant Clark (first article, second article) on Web Ontology or the “Semantic Web”: a proposal for a systematized markup that would make Web content structured and machine-readable (and object-oriented, but that’s another discussion).
Steven Johnson in Emergence notes — correctly — that the Web, as it is, is undifferentiated, and, insofar as organization goes, kind of stupid. Though search engines make somewhat usable maps of the landscape, and though TCP/IP quite elegantly allows machines to send information to one another, there is really no innate knowledge structure here. An ant knows what ants are around it, and ant colonies have a remarkable systemic sophistication as a result. But a Web site doesn’t have a granular, bottom-up way to understand the data or connections around it or related to it.
There are all sorts of solutions that humans have implemented in order to develop our own understanding of these connections — clickstream reports, referrer reports, log rollups, as well as search engines — and there’s software like Alexa and TrackBack which assemble aggregate traffic and connection data. But OWL would blow this all wide open, expanding the connection categories way beyond traffic trends and string matches. It would create a formal knowledge structure for the Web, would allow the automated processing of structured Web data, and would inevitably facilitate the emergence of new and immensely useful patterns and structures from the Web.
If they were making “Scrooge” the musical while Dickens was still writing “A Christmas Carol,” and the two were influencing the writing of one another (with Dickens, say, restructuring the text on the fly to fit a theatrical act-by-act structure, so that theatre-goers could better relate to the book, while at the same time responding to reader reaction as he had always done)…
… and, rather than ending the text, Dickens sold it off to a publishing house, who hired another writer to continue writing it indefinitely under the name “Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol”)…
… while at the same time another writer was penning “Young Scrooge Meets Becky Sharp in France” at a higher price point for “Scrooge Geeks”…
… then you would be getting a fiction network going.
Wildguard is being billed as comics’ answer to reality TV. It’s fun to think about what implications this has for “reality,” but aside from that, it illustrates that the interactivity between audience and creators in comics is manifesting itself in new and more immediate ways. However, this interactivity itself isn’t new, just differently facilitated, as anyone who watched Ben Reilly get “voted off the island” will tell you.
I’ve watched a few episodes of Teen Titans now, and I’m amazed at the vision of animation it’s demonstrating. Fewer than 10 years ago, Scott McCloud used the visual idiom of anime and manga to illustrate the relativity and locality of such idioms — the visual language of comics in Japan was used as an example of something fundamentally different from the visual language of the US. Now, their idiom is our idiom. Teen Titans uses the lines and expressions of anime continuously and fairly seamlessly — it’s not putting on an anime costume for the sake of novelty but has incorporated the visual language of anime whole hog.
Now that anime’s become a mainstream idiom in the West, I wonder how long it will take to become the mainstream idiom?
They’re collecting the comics from whatisthematrix.com.
Ivan Askwith in Salon argues that, because it’s coordinated tightly across comics, video games and films, The Matrix as a networked fiction “offer(s) a new model for storytelling in the detail-obsessed, information-saturated digital age.” Several of the claims here are a little hyperbolic and dubious — if we’re so “detail-obsessed,” how come a considerable chunk of Americans think Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are related? — and, in the end, even Askwith admits that the Wachowski’s “new model of storytelling” looks an awful lot like the one George Lucas started 25 years ago. But, the article does raise the issue of what makes our perception of Matrix a little different from our perception of Marvel or DC or even Harry Potter: the idea that the Wachowskis are not just producers but auteurs, that their vision is enforced upon the franchised fiction system more powerfully than ever before and that the the product(s) of such a singular vision are de facto better than those produced by a lot of visions working together.
Even if the idea of a “singular vision” in a fiction network wasn’t totally divorced from reality (meet Geof Darrow and Steve Skroce, just to start), I don’t see why that centrality and unity is necessarily better. There’s no question that the Wachowskis have strong control over Matrix, and that this control has resulted in a narrative with greater unity and coherence across all its media than, say, The Hulk. But let’s think about some of the assumptions here: if unity is better, why? (Matrix is certainly innovative, compelling, and sophisticated, but is that because it has unity?) Perhaps more importantly, does greater control equal greater creative power?
Maybe I’ll mess with “auteur” as a concept later, but suffice it to say that I’m not sure it’s fair to all the other people who have built The Matrix to assume without question that these guys are better artists, rather than better managers.
My name’s Jason, and I’m a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m (hopefully) less than a year away from finishing my dissertation. I study popular fictions in the mediasphere (X-Men, EverQuest, The Matrix), considering issues of authorship, audience participation, “narrative management” and story multiplicity. I’m being kind of obtuse here, but I hope you’ll get a better idea as you read the entries.
I’ve just come back to school after 3 years in “the world” developing Web applications: a year at ActiveInk Corporation during the heady days of start-ups and two at Cirrus Logic after that bubble burst. I’ve been working with ExploreLearning this summer and hope to keep doing so throughout the year. Most of my time’s been spent with Java/J2EE and ColdFusion. I’ve done a lot of XML programming (Java XML APIs, schemas, XSLT), and XML’s holding a lot of my interest at the moment. I’m also about to enter the world of PHP with an app here at school.
I’m married to a fantastic guy named Mike.
I read a lot of comics.
