Researcher of interest who specializes in “haptic interfaces.”

“Margaret Minsky is an internationally-known researcher in the field of haptic interfaces (computational interfaces that simulate objects what you can touch and feel), as well as a contributor in computer graphics, educational technology, and human-computer interaction. She developed the first technique for creating haptic textures, a Lateral-Force Algorithm, while at the MIT Media Lab. Her comments on haptics have been featured in the New York Times and she now presents invited teaching and lectures in the USA and Japan, as well as serving on program committees and conference review boards.

Holding a doctorate from MIT, she was among the first ten technical staff at Interval Research Corporation, and is now a consultant. She also founded a design/manufacturing company to produce innovative clothing and textile processing. Her previous positions include Research Director at Atari Cambridge Laboratory. Her research has been published in conference proceedings in the fields of computer graphics, haptics, and mechanical engineering, and she served as editor and contributor to a book about the Logo programming language, LogoWorlds.� (From the web site).

Starter Links: Margaretminsky.com

Online community owned by its residents.

“Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by nearly 100,000 people from around the globe.” (From the web site.)

Starter Links: Second Life | mouchette.org | Guardian Unlimited article about publishing in Second Life

Literary group interested in experimental poetry created by mathematical constraints.

“Oulipo stands for “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle”, which translates roughly as “workshop of potential literature.” It is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians, and seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members include novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, and poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

The group defines the term ‘littérature potentielle’ as (rough translation): “the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.” Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and ispiration, most notably Perec’s “story-making machine” which he used in the construction of Life: A User’s Manual. As well as established techniques, such as lipograms (Perec’s novel A Void) and palindromes, the group devises new techniques, often based on mathematical problems such as the Knight’s Tour of the chess-board and permutations.

Oulipo was founded on November 24, 1960, as a subcommittee of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique entitled Séminaire de littérature expérimentale. However at their second meeting, this first name was withdrawn in favor of today’s Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or OuLiPo, at Albert-Marie Schmidt’s suggestion. The idea, however, preceded the first meeting by roughly two months, when a small group met in September at Cerisy-la-Salle for a colloquium on Queneau’s work. During this seminar, Queneau and François Le Lionnais conceived of the society. (From the Wikipedia article about Oulipo.)

Starter Links: Oulipo | article about Oulipo (with links to poems) | wikipedia article

Diane Gromala’s experimental book project (2000-present; a semi-finalist for Discover’s award in technological innovation).

“*The Living Book of Senses* is a new media form that extends the traditional book into a radically new sensorially interactive experience.

Users are able to see their physical surroundings while dynamically engaging with three-dimensional mixed realities which appear on their headsets. Users can interact with the book in dynamic ways that go beyond mere clicking and pointing. They can ask the book questions (via voice recognition), and can influence the book through their sensory (bio) feedback. Thus, the book becomes a powerful new sensory experience.

Users wear a headset/head-tracker/color camera system that enables them to see physical reality enhanced with a virtual reality overlay. The camera inputs images/patterns and feeds them back into the ARToolkit software which then displays digital information associated with the physical markers onto the headset. The ARToolkit can calculate camera position and orientation relative to physical markers in real time for video-mediated reality.

Each reader can view AR scenes from their own visual perspective. Users can fly into the immersive world and see each other represented as avatars in the same virtual scene. Readers remaining in the AR scene have a birds’-eye view of other readers as miniature avatars in the virtual scene displayed through their headset. User-controlled dialog with the book elicits responses/answers from the book (expressed in digital data: visual, textual, auditory). As the users simultaneously interact with the book in the physical and virtual realms, the book responds to individual and multiple physical states (via biofeedback) to express resulting changes in narrative. The narrative is a cultural history of the senses. The Living Book is an enhanced learning tool that enables users to become aware of their sensorial experience and bodily states. Collaborations using this book enable distance learning with multiple user interactions. The living book can be used in any narrative-based media to create dynamic communication between any number of people.â€? (From the web site).

Starter Links: Living Book of the Sense

Diane Gromala’s responsive font types (2000-present).

“BioMorphic Typography is Gromala’s term for a family of fonts that respond, in real-time, to a user’s changing physical states, as measured by a biofeedback device. Rather than one typeface, it is a postmodern pastiche of many different fonts that are continually morphing. So, for example, the font “throbs” as the user’s/writer’s heart beats. In this way, users become aware of their autonomic states. This project is part of a larger initiative, Design for the Senses. The goal is to develop new approaches to experiential design that focus on the senses and the history of the body” (From the web site).

Starter Links: BioMorphic Typeâ„¢

Transliteracies Research Report By Nathan Blake

Bill Seaman’s 1996 interactive and computer-mediated reading environment/ art exhibit.

“The World Generator / The Engine of Desire is an interactive computer-mediated environment which enables viewers to construct and navigate poetic worlds in real time based on an interactive template of potential choices. The system is facilitated through a new interface metaphor. At the bottom of the screen is a rotating set of container-wheels. These container-wheels house a variety of selections. One mode allows the viewer to observe a full screen blow-up of this menu. The menu system contains the following set of wheels: 3d models; poetic text fragments; texture maps – both still and video; location sensitive audio objects (musical loops); behaviours; and function menus which enable the viewer to center themselves in the world; to scale objects and texture maps; to make objects and texture maps transparent; to construct random worlds; to make a series of different “random” choices including random text, random sound, random object, random texture map, random movie, random world, random behaviours; as well as to clear the world. The still and moving texture maps can either be applied to objects with an “aura” or be placed in the space as pictures and/or movies on flat screens.

The work functions in a two stage process: The viewer first constructs a “poetic” environment based on selections from the template of variables. When the viewer chooses the “objects wheel” from the main menu, a set of container-wheels housing pre-rendered 3D objects, rotates. The actual storage is in the form of long “virtual” rotating belts which can have great length (based on available memory) although the viewer only sees the curved front edge of the belt. The following manipulations can be made: Layout – placement of the object on the site; Scale – scale of object on the site; Texture Map – attach still or video texture map to an object with an aura, as well as place “screens” of stills and video into the space, when the aura is toggled off; Behaviours – attach behaviours to selected objects, texture map screens, and/or sounds. Once this process has been completed (or anytime during the construction process) the viewer can enter the space and navigate. An elaborate object-based text is included in The World Generator. A viewer can choose any single line from the text and place it in the space as a visual object with a “location sensitive” audio text triggering mechanism.

Recombinant Music -The sounds included in the system are made up of hundreds of techno ambient loops, composed by the author, consisting of synthetic rhythms, drones and tonal loops. Specific tonal sax loops have been played by Tony Wheeler. These sound object loops are placed by the viewer on the site. As the viewer navigates, a location sensitive audio mix is generated.

The work can be interacted with from multiple locations. Two or more users can be involved with poetic construction and/or navigation in the space at the same time, currently via modem, and in the near future via the WWW. I have coined the term “RE-I” (pronounced RAY or Re—I) short for Re-embodied Intelligence, as the term to describe the visual representation of these alternate, multiple users. A “RE-I” is potentially visible in the space, showing the location of the alternate userâ€? (from the Project Description).

Starter Links: Project description | “Recombinant Poetics” | bio | links to the artist’s work| exhibition notes | about the artist

The Tilty Tables are part of Xerox PARC’s reading experiments of 2000. The experiment consists of three “tilty tables” that explore different aspects of reading. Tilty Table #1, The Reading Table, provides a non-linear interface to a text as a way to explore reading extraordinarily large documents. The second, The Tall Tale Table, uses the syntactical rules of the English language in order to construct nonsense tales. The Peace Table, the third in the experiment, translates the word “peace” into different languages as a way of exploring whether reading can bring about peace on Earth.

“There are three Tilty Tables placed across the front of the gallery. Each Tilty Table is a three-by-three-foot-wide white square resting on a metal podium. The table is attached in such a way as to allow it to be tilted in all directions. Projected on to the white surface of each table is a high-resolution image, so that it appears as if the table is itself a glowing screen. When visitors tilt the table the images on its surface change in direct response.

How does it work? The tables sit on pneumatic shock absorbers, much like the ones used in cars to smooth out the ride. Also under each table is a digital device called “an accelerometer” which measures how quickly something is getting faster or slower. (Acceleration means rate of change. For example, a car going from 0 to 60 is accelerating. A car moving at a steady 60 miles per hour is not accelerating at all.) As it turns out, an accelerometer can also measure tilt, much the same way that the bubble in a carpenter’s level can measure tilt. This is because gravity is really acceleration (as Newton discovered 400 years ago). The tilt information from the accelerometers is sent to computers that use this information to determine the correct image to send to the video projectors. These projectors are mounted in the ceiling and are precisely aligned with the tables beneath them so that the images fill the white surface of the tables.” (Matt Gorbet, 2000)

Starter Links: tilty tables

Transliteracies Research Report By Nathan Blake

Orit Kruglanski’s 2000 art installation.

“an interface which allows words to manipulate the user physically as well as emotionally.â€? (Utterback 2004: 225) The interactive poem uses a specially designed force-feedback mouse; the more the “nonapologiesâ€? (“don’t forgive me for…â€?) collect, the stronger the magnetic force on the mouse becomes. “In Kruglanski’s piece the symbolic or emotional weight of words is brought to bear on one’s physical freedom of motionâ€? (Utterback 2004: 225).

Starter Links and References: artists’s web site | Camille Utterback’s “Unusual Positions–Embodied Interaction with Symbolic Spaces.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 2004.

Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s 1999 art installation.

“Text Rain is an interactive installation in which participants use the familiar instrument of their bodies, to do what seems magical–to lift and play with falling letters that do not really exist. In the Text Rain installation participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. On the screen they see a mirrored video projection of themselves in black and white, combined with a color animation of falling letters. Like rain or snow, the letters appears to land on participants’ heads and arms. The letters respond to the participants’ motions and can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again. The falling text will ‘land’ on anything darker than a certain threshold, and ‘fall’ whenever that obstacle is removed. If a participant accumulates enough letters along their outstretched arms, or along the silhouette of any dark object, they can sometimes catch an entire word, or even a phrase. The falling letters are not random, but form lines of a poem about bodies and language. ‘Reading’ the phrases in the Text Rain installation becomes a physical as well as a cerebral endeavor.” (From the web site.)

Text takes on the behaviors of objects that respond to forces in the real world and also to the physical gestures of viewers. (220) “Similarly to the text in the Poetic Garden, the text here continues to serve its symbolic function as an decipherable code, but also as an ‘object’ viewers can engage with as if it were a real physical entity […] the physical act of catching letters is necessary in order to read the text at all […] Because most of one’s body is visible in the virtual space of the screen as well as in the physical space in front of the screen, a pleasurable confusion results between the screen space and the real space.” (Utterback 2004: 221)

Starter Links and resources: Text Rain | Camille Utterback’s “Unusual Positions–Embodied Interaction with Symbolic Spaces.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 2004.

Transliteracies Research Report By Nathan Blake

David Small and Tom White’s 1997-98 art installation.

“A six foot square garden sits in the middle of an otherwise ordinary computer lab. Water briskly flows down a series of cacsades into a glowing pool. Projected on the surface of the pool and flowing as if they were caught in the water’s grasp are a tangle of words. You can reach out and touch the flow, blocking it or stirring up the words causing them to grow and divide, morphing into new words that are pulled into the drain and pumped back to the head of the stream to tumble down againâ€? (From the web site).

An installation in which texts escapes from the flat screen and spills out into the viewer’s physical space. The installation consists of a garden with rock slabs, plants and water flowing from one level of a multi-tiered fountain to the next. (219) “While the text still carries its symbolic weight as words, it also becomes the physical objects of leaves or detritus carried along by the water’s flow.â€? (Utterback 2004: 220) “The tension between the intangibility of the projected text and its behavior as a tangible object (which you can ‘touch’ via the interface) parallels the tension between the text’s position as a signifier for a real object and the real object it represents.â€? (Utterback 2004: 220)

Starter Links and References: Stream of Consciousness | Camille Utterback’s “Unusual Positions–Embodied Interaction with Symbolic Spaces.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 2004.

Online dictionary and thesaurus that visually displays words within a network of related terms.

“The Visual Thesaurus is a dictionary and thesaurus with an intuitive interface that encourages exploration and learning. Available in both a Desktop Edition and an Online Edition, the Visual Thesaurus is a marvelous way to improve your vocabulary and your understanding of the English language.

The Visual Thesaurus’s intuitive interface helps you find words through their semantic relationship with other words and meanings. This focus results in a more precise understanding of the English language. ” (From the web site.)

Starter Links: Visual Thesaurus

Contemporary book exchange enabled by online tracking.

“BookCrossers register a book by going to the website atBookCrossing.com, entering the ISBN number of the book, and getting a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number) that is then written inside the cover (or on a bookmark) along with the website address. Convenient and eye-catching BookCrossing bookmarks can be printed from the website, making the registration process quick and easy.

“It’s really quite simple,” Hornbaker continues. “And even if you don’t want to give your books away, you can register them at BookCrossing.com to have your very own free, virtual bookshelf, complete with your personal reviews, to show the world the books you’ve read.”

Adventurous BookCrossers release their books “into the wild” on park benches, in coffee shops, in phone booths… wherever the interplay of distance and chance can make things interesting. They’re fascinated with the fate, karma, or whatever you want to call the chain of events that can occur between two or more lives and one piece of literature.

More conservative BookCrossers give their books to friends, relatives, or charities, and enjoy reading the resulting journal entries from person to person.” (From the web site.)

Starter Links: research report by Alison Walker | BookCrossing | Wikipedia’s Entry on BookCrossing | CNN srticle on BookCrossing

Transliteracies Research Report By Alison Walker

Web site devoted to various contemporary writing and alphabetic systems.

This site contains details of most alphabets and other writing systems currently in use, as well as quite a few ancient and invented ones. It also includes information about some of the languages written with those writing systems, and multilingual texts.” (From the web site.)

Starter Links: Omniglot | A review of Omniglot

Book that reviews the research and studies the practices of accessing and browsing information; culminates in a model of the browsing process:

“Rice, Ronald A., Maureen McCreadie, and Shan-Ju L. Chang, Accessing and Browsing Information and Communication. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. This book synthesizes literature in relevant fields of information and communication studies to articulate an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the way users access and browse.” (From Nowell Marshall’s research report.)

“This book contends that accessing and browsing information and communication are multidimensional and consequential aspects of the information user’s entire experience and of general human behavior. Problems in information creation, processing, transmittal, and use often arise from an incomplete conceptualization of the “information seeking” process, where information seeking is viewed as the intentional finding of specific information. The process has traditionally been considered to begin with some kind of search query and end with some kind of obtained information. That, however, may be only the last, most easily observable—and perhaps not even primary—stage of a complex sequence of activities.
        This book reviews related theory, research, practice, and implications from a wide range of disciplines. It also analyzes converging forms of information, including mass media, online information services, the Internet and World Wide Web, libraries, public spaces, advertisements, and organizational communication. Extensive case studies illustrate the theoretical material.” (from publisher’s blurb)

Starter Links and References: MIT Press, 2001 (ISBN 0-262-18214-9) | Publisher’s blurb | Table of contents & sample chapters | Nowell Marshall’s research report

Transliteracies Research Report By Nowell Marshall

Software program that culls meaning from searchable text.

“ConceptNet focuses on semantic meaning in a text, analyzing concepts and the contexts in which they are found, offering a unique approach compared to traditional keyword or statistical evaluations of texts.

ConceptNet has been used as the basis for several programs designed to distill particular meanings from texts (affect, for example) and provide intelligent feedback about the text’s content.” (From Katrina Kimport’s research report.)

Starter Links: ConceptNet

Transliteracies Research Report By Katrina Kimport

Conference series that brings together computer scientists and humanities computing researchers to share research on “the linguistic, visual, and aural manifestations of text.”

• “What textual research methodologies can be automated or assisted by computing?
• How can computing assist us in visualizing electronic texts?
• What data mining techniques are there for answering interesting questions relevant to humanist enquiry within large bodies of texts?
• How can text analysis research benefit and learn from applied text systems in such areas as science, law, and digital libraries?
• What new models are there for navigating and displaying textual information, including multimedia?
• What is some of the current research in computer science that may have an application in humanist enquiry?
• What roles do genres (both traditional and digital) play in the development of
and use of digital text?
• How are new interaction devices (from handhelds to tabletops, wall displays and
wearable devices) changing the way that we interact with text?
• How are they changing design models for digital text?
• How do we evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of new methodologies and
technologies for using and studying text?
• What open questions in Humanities Computing can be addressed by further computer science research?”
  (from Overview of CaSTA ‘06)

  Starter Links: CaSTA home page | Overview of CaSTA ‘06

MacArthur Foundation-funded initiative by the American Library Association’s Office of Information & Technology Policy and the University of Washington to conduct research into the credibility of information on the Internet.

“The credibility of Internet information is a problem. While the credibility of Information in general is an issue, the Internet presents a new set of challenges. Today the public is expected to book their own airline tickets, decide on their own retirement plan, even decide on life and death medical treatments with the tools and information on the web. With a disappearing paper trail in voting, with no one official copy of government documents, with a lack of common criteria in presenting and consuming credible information there is a great need to research and develop real tools to help the citizen. Addressing these issues now, as tools are being developed and more critical information is becoming exclusively Internet information, will prevent larger and more dire consequences in the near and long-term future.” (from About the Commons)

A notable goal of the initiative is to “incorporate new credibility tools and mechanisms into a wide array of information products.” Initial tools include Reference Extract, Digital Reference Face Off, and Credibility Repository.

Starter Links: Credibility Commons home page | About the Commons | Projects

New generation of small digital projectors (standalone or built into mobile devices) using
PVProâ„¢ laser projection technology from Light Blue Optics.

“Laser projection using computer-generated holograms (CGHs) represents a compelling alternative to conventional image projection. Video projectors based on this CGH technology are efficient and require only a very few components, which means they can be made very small—and the smaller the CGH, the bigger the image that results. So a tiny projector producing large images could, for the first time, be integrated into a laptop, a PDA, or even a mobile phone.” (from Light Blue Optics home page)

Starter Links: Light Blue Optics home page | Images of projector: 1, 2

Ornate book of hours from the 14th century.

Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc du Berry (“The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berryâ€?) is one of the most sumptuous and costly books of hours. The calendars in Les Tres Riches Heures were painted by Paul, Hermann and Jean Limoges, three brothers from Flanders. Later additions were carried out by the late 14th- century artist Jean Colombe. The original manuscript is at the Condé Museum in Chantilly, France. (From Donna Beth Ellard’s research report.)

Starter Links: Resources for Further Study:
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/images/heures/heures.html | http://members.tripod.com/~gunhouse/hourstxt/hrstoc.htm | http://sunsite.lib.berkeley.edu/Scriptorium/index.html | Les Tres Riches Heures du duc de Berry, CD, Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004

Transliteracies Research Report By Donna Beth Ellard

Blogdex is a research project from the MIT Media Laboratory that traces the diffusion of content, represented in the form of hypertext links, over time, through blogs.

“Programs such as Blogdex offer a window into the networking structure of the blogging community, an opportunity to systematically analyze large textual datasets, and a way to think about meaning in the online environment.” (From Katrina Kimport’s research report.)

Starter Links: Blogdex

Transliteracies Research Report By Katrina Kimport

Format for syndicating web content.

“RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it’s not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the “recent changes” page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.â€? (From xml.com.)

Links: xml.com article | Wikipedia Article

Free online blogging hosting.

“A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world… Since Blogger was launched, almost five years ago, blogs have reshaped the web, impacted politics, shaken up journalism, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and connect with others.â€? (From Blogger.)

Links: Blogger

LiveJournal is an online journal community.

“LiveJournal is a simple-to-use communication tool that lets you express yourself and connect with friends online.

You can use LiveJournal in many different ways: as a private journal, a blog, a social network and much more.� (From the LiveJournal homepage.)

Starter Links: LiveJournal

Online community and forums for fans of television shows, particularly reality shows and hour-long dramas.

“Our mandate is, more or less, to give people a place to revel in their guilty televisual pleasures. In most cases, we have a complex love/hate relationship with the show, and this site is a way for us to work through those feelings. If we plain hated a show, we wouldn’t pay it any attention at all. (Becker, are your ears burning?)â€? (From FAQ section of TwoP site).

See also, for discussion of the relation between the forums and television executives, “The Remote Controllersâ€? by Marshall Sella, NYT 10/20/02.

Starter Links: Television Without Pity

Transliteracies Research Report By Katrina Kimport

Free online community, with multiple local chapters, hosting classifieds and forums.

“Q: What is craigslist?
A: Local community classifieds and forums – a place to find jobs, housing, goods & services, social activities, a girlfriend or boyfriend, advice, community information, and just about anything else—all for free, and in a relatively non-commercial environment.

Q: What is craigslist trying to accomplish?
A: Provide a trustworthy, efficient, relatively non-commerical place for folks to find all the basics in their local area.� (From the Fact Sheet on main Craigslist site)

Craigslist has been involved in a recent lawsuit regarding the legality of some of its housing postings in regard to fair housing legislation (see “IDEAS & TRENDS; The Ads Discriminate, but Does the Web?â€? by Adam Liptak, NYT 3/5/06). Additionally, many have argued that the Craigslist free format has made newspaper classified ads–a primary source of print revenue–obsolete (see “The Media Business, Advertising: The Newspapers Offer a Case for Keeping Them Aroundâ€? by Julie Bosman, NYT, 12/8/05).

Starter Links: craigslist

Typographical character frequently used and put to novel uses in the online environment.

“The @ symbol has been a central part of the Internet and its forerunners ever since it was chosen to be a separator in e-mail addresses by Ray Tomlinson in 1972. From puzzled comments which surface from time to time in various newsgroups, it appears the biggest problem for many Net users is deciding what to call it. This is perhaps unsurprising, as outside the narrow limits of bookkeeping, invoicing and related areas few people use it regularly. Even fewer ever have to find a name for it, so it’s noted mentally as something like ‘that letter a with the curly line round it.’â€? (from World Wide Words)

In addition to its functions in the online realm, the “@â€? symbol is increasingly commonly used to render gendered words, usually of Spanish origin, gender-neutral. For example, in referencing a population of Latinos and Latinas, typists can record Latin@s to include both men and women, without using the default of the male-specific suffix.

Starter Links: World Wide Words

Online archive of information related to early print.

“A much overlooked part of Britain’s national heritage is the wealth of printed material produced in the first three hundred years after the invention of the printing press. As well as charting key moments in the development of English literature, this material offers contemporary accounts of major historical events, such as the English Civil War, the Union of the Crowns, the discovery of the Americas and advances in science and medicine.

Launched in January 2003, the Britain in Print project will, for the first time, provide free access for all – from the home, school, library, or workplace – to information about the rich collections of early British books that are held in twenty-one of the nation’s most important libraries.” (From the web site.)

Starter Links: Britain in Print | Britain in Print has the Backing of the Heritage Lottery Fund | The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland talks about Britain in Print | Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL)

The next phase of the world wide web.

“Web 2.0 is a term popularized by O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International as the name for a series of web development conferences that started in October 2004. It has since come to refer to what some people describe as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997). They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The term may include blogs and wikis. To some extent Web 2.0 has become a buzzword, incorporating whatever is newly popular on the Web (such as tags and podcasts). A consensus on its exact meaning has not yet been reached.” (From wikipedia)

Starter Links: wikipedia definition | O’Reilly Radar definition

Online search engine that provides an innovative method for searching the web.

“StumbleUpon uses [thumbs-up/thumbs-down] ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like—minded stumblers have liked.” (From StumbleUpon.)

Starter Links: StumbleUpon

Popular type of “reading” alternative made from recordings of spoken words.

“An audio book is a recording of the contents of a book read aloud. It is usually distributed on compact discs (CDs), cassette tapes, or digital formats (e.g., MP3 and Windows Media Audio). The term “audio book” has been synonymous with “books on tape” for roughly 20 years. Cassette tape sales still comprise roughly 40% of the audio book market, with CDs the other dominant format type.” (From Wikipedia)

Starter Links: Wiki article

Online search engine that visualizes search results.

“KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm.” (From KartOO.)

Starter Links: KartOO | article about KartOO from The State

“A design cut in relief on a block of wood, for printing from; a print or impression obtained from this; a wood-engraving.â€? (from the OED. n.)

Starter Links: [under construction]

“1. a. Antiq. An instrument made of metal, bone, etc., having one end sharp-pointed for incising letters on a wax tablet, and the other flat and broad for smoothing the tablet and erasing what is written. 1. Also applied to similar instruments in later use.â€? (From the OED.n.1,a)

Starter Links: [under construction]

“A writing-room; spec. the room in a religious house set apart for the copying of manuscripts.” (from the OED.n.)

Starter Links: [under construction]

“A writer; one whose business is writing. In various specific or limited applications; 3. Used as the official designation of various public functionaries performing secretarial duties. 4. a. One who writes at another’s dictation; an amanuensis. Obs. 5. A copyist, transcriber of manuscripts; now esp. the writer of a particular MS. copy of a classical or mediæval work.â€? (From the OED.n1.1, 3-5)

Starter Links: [under construction]

Tool used to remove ink from a manuscript.

Starter Links: [under construction]

7-8th century stone cross in Ruthwell, just south of Dumfries, Scotland. Latin and Runic inscriptions as well as pictorial images on each face of the cross.

Starter Links: [under construction]

“I. 1. The Book of Psalms, as one of the books of the Old Testament b. A translation or particular version (prose or metrical) of the Book of Psalms c. A copy of, or a volume containing, the Psalms, esp. as arranged for liturgical or devotional use.â€? (From the OED.n.II.1, b-c)

Starter Links: [under construction]

“1. a. A piece of animal skin, esp. from a sheep or goat, dressed and prepared as a surface for writing; a scroll or roll of this material; a manuscript or document written on this.â€? (From the OED.n.I,1)

Starter Links: [under construction]

“1. Paper, parchment, or other writing material designed to be reusable after any writing on it has been erased. b. In extended use: a thing likened to such a writing surface, esp. in having been reused or altered while still retaining traces of its earlier form; a multi-layered record.â€? (From the OED.n.A,1-2)

Starter Links: [under construction]