electronic writing

The Cave Writing Workshop is an advanced experimental electronic writing workshop founded by Robert Coover, exploring the potential of text, sound, and narrative movement in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality. It brings together teams of undergraduate and graduate fiction writers, poets and playwrights, composers and sound engineers, graphic designers, visual artists, 3D modelers and programmers, to develop, within the environment of Brown’s “Cave” in the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization, projects that focus on the word. From 2002 onward writers have explored the possibilities of spatial hypertext in an immersive environment. What this paper proposes is an exploration of the history of the twin currents of hypertext and virtual reality that merged to create this particular form of expression, going back to the early hypertext systems developed at Brown University in the 1960’s by Ted Nelson/van Dam/et al and work in immersive virtual reality at University of Illinois’ CAVE in the early 1990s.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

This book is a study of the computer as a new technology for reading and writing -- a technology that may replace the printing press as our principal medium of symbolic communication. One of the main subjects of Writing Space is hypertext, a technique that allows scientists, scholars, and creative writers to construct texts that interact with the needs and desires of the reader. Bolter explores both the theory and practice of hypertext, demonstrating that the computer as hypertext represents a new stage in the long history of writing, one that has far-reaching implications in the fields of human and artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy, semiotics, and literary theory.Through a masterful integration of introductory, historical, illustrative, and theoretical material as well as an accompanying diskette containing a sample of hypertextual writing, Bolter supports his claim that the computer will carry literacy into a new age -- the age of electronic text that will emerge from the "age of print that is now passing." His reflections on literacy in contemporary culture lead him to a compelling conclusion: ironically, cultural literacy is becoming almost synonymous with computer literacy.

(Source: Publisher's description)