MEETING NOTES, August 14, 2001: Nathan, Steve, Andrea, Johanna, Worthy
[Pre-meeting discussion of beautiful Maggie, individual attitudes towards family life, children's flesh and its contact with furniture, television and child-rearing, dust, weather, and self-proclaimed positions on breeding and global population are entirely stricken from the record.]
No attempt is made to make verbatim transcription. Individual attributions are to give folks credit, but corrections to this record are welcome.
S: What we're aiming to create, in its most distilled form, is an annotation software that lives on the web. Topics maps seem promising as a way to make the display of game play as well as to create dynamic, real-time relations among texts.
N: Interested in focusing on process, why and how the iterative process for designing software works/doesn't work. From the outset we should be clear about our plan and project. If we are making annotation software, there are already products and/or open source products we could borrow, use, adapt. Can what we are trying to make be adapted to other people's projects? Is it web-based, meaning are we using http software to communicate between a server and a client?
S: In some ways this could be understood as a glorified email client. As Crit-server is a specialization of hyper-mail. WEB base solves the platform problem.
N: But the web-context limits/defines the project in fundamental ways. The story-boards J&J created can't be implemented on the web. They are softwareapplication type story boards.
S/N: Would we want to create applets for certain functions? Regular HTML will get us a good part of the way. If we get involved with applets then we run into problems of platforms and jvms (java virtual machines inside browers, different versions etc., problems with various graphics capabilities etc.)
S: But dynamic HTML can do a lot.
A: What do we want for a proof of concept? If we want to make something quickly, then should we just adapt an existing annotation software? Do we want some version of the interface? What do we want to take to funders. What's the minimal effort to get started?
N: A demo of the game to show to funders? Crit-note is ham-fisted in its interface but has good back-end model and proxy etc.
S: But to use Crit we'd have to hack Hypermail which is written in C.
N: Do we want to SHOW HOW the game is played? Showcase OUR abilities and capabilities? What do we want for a proof of concept.
W: The MIT game folks who were getting money from Microsoft had no clearly stated pedagogical agenda or justification. If we are to develop a prototype, we need to be clear on what the students get out of playing the game.
J: We will want to state our pedagogic aim, show our capabilities to actually make the project, and have some images of how the game is played. We should concentrate on creating a well-thought through conceptual blueprint for the project that demonstrates a technical understanding of what's involved in actually building it AND made an animated sequence of screen shots that show how the game is played.
N: J&J had come up with an ideal, ALL possible worlds vision. We should pare that down to a reasonable and possible project. Flash animation for the demo is no problem. But the research in HCI (Human Computer Interaction) shows that in many cases of software development, an insufficient amount of modelling of the TASKS to be done by the user often plagues the project. We should put our energy into developing a very solid user analysis model, task model, rather than building something only to find it doesn't do what we want.
S: Agile software development seems to have helped with the problem.
N: We'll nee some kind of palette/workspace, a white-board or etc. Then we can work from that.
W: The pedagogical element still seems to need clarification.
S: One principle is the idea that doing literary criticism IS intervening in the text. Ivanhoe demonstrates this dramatically.
W: But what kinds of intervention are going to be permitted? How will they be assessed? There are effective/ineffective ways of intervening. What is it we SEE as a game space and how is that participating in the pedagogical agenda?
A: Another crucial element is the access to and development of awareness of a discourse field for a text.
W: Ancillary information, secondary texts.
J: We also want to stress the extent to which the game forces self-consciousness and reflection about assumptions underlying interpretation. Thus the fact that every player has to have a role and that a player file with justification for each move has to be created.
N: This kind of self-consciousness seems mainly useful for grad students.
S: Maybe not, the undergrads would simply have a different degree or level of self-consciousness, but they still could be made aware of their assumptions.
A: Even if they only deal with the idea of a discourse field and explore bibliography and etc.
S: The patterns we all saw as readers when we began to be involved with a text for the purpose of playing a game were striking - and we're used to looking for patterns. The game task really pushed this.
W: If part of the point is to have an environment that increases introspection and self-reflection about a text then the footprint of the intervention has to show. There has to be something that makes people STOP and LOOK at the interventions so they are forced to this consideration.
S: Yes, which is another way this goes beyond annotation software - collaborative annotation alone does not force self-consciousness.
N: What's the difference between re-writing alone and playing the game in collaboration? Direct interaction? Or is there a more formalized way to reward interaction and self-consciousness?
S: Force the players to engagement, punish solipcism, reward interaction.
W: How will this be implemented?
J: Capital expenditure, as in Sim-City, limited amount of play capacity for each player so choices have consequences.
A: We had discussed a game-master. If we have to have an AI feature that actually reads the texts to assess their relevance etc. then that's too ambitious, but if we simply need to count links etc. that's do-able.
J: Points.
All: YES. (Reservations expressed on behalf of the absent JJMcG were overruled. Sorry. Truth and Beauty were invoked. A moment of silence. Then we moved on.)
W: We still have to address the issue of display of the source-text and the "intervened" text. What is the status of the intervened text for further activity? Blue-highlight of marked texts, filter, screening out, when do you see or not see the interventions?
J: Need to be able to see both/all - source text, interventions, intervened text etc. in different modes. This has to be part of the basic functionality.
END: We agreed to pursue this user analysis model, develop a clear conceptual blueprint with technical specs as part of it, Nathan will help design a Flash animation demo once we're further along. Other participation on his part will depend on the project's form.