Launching Ariadne's OWL

I'm launching an OWL, an online writing laboratory. Really it's a blog, but it's purpose is to create an online writing community. We'll see how it goes. I've had it in mind for years, but the technology was always out of my reach, now it really isn't.

When I say, it's always been on my mind, I have to go back to my Masters Degree, which I pursued in the 1980s at Sonoma State University. I remember sitting down in front of a computer terminal for the first time—in a lab directed toward math and science students. I was talking a self-directed course in Basic programming. Word processors and personal computers didn't exist, let alone laptops. There was no Internet, no web, no social networking, not even email—just math and science types learning to program.

The Basic interface was a bit like a word processor. To program required entering words, symbols, numbers and letters into the processor. Language. Basic is a language. It didn't take me long to realize that the computer was disinterested, that it didn't care whether I spoke Basic to it or English. It did things when I spoke Basic, returned error messages when I spoke English. But, the little space I'm typing in right now, to post this blog entry, is really not all that different than the little space I was using to type Basic into the processor, just more sophisticated.

As I remember, I was only a couple of lessons into it when I sat down one day and started a novel in which the main character communicated with extraterrestrial intelligence using the computer. I claimed it was some kind of electromagnetic device that was sophisticated enough for them to use to translate their normal means of communication into human symbols and words.... English, and that my main character (me) stumbled onto it by accident.

After that I logged dozens of hours in my self-directed course—my access to the techno-future that was exploding around me. About a year later, I had convinced Sonoma State to accept my proposal for an individual Masters in which I would study the impact of computers on the writing process. For my Master's Thesis I tried to design a nonlinear world of words, images, instructions and story. I tried to do it using Basic. I also tried to learn Cobalt, but even though I could spend the entire night in the lab, trying to make one little thing happen—without getting bored—I was never cut out to be a programmer. At some point I gave up. My vision was over my head.

A few years later some blessed soul developed Hypercard, a program that ran on Apple computers and was a simple form of what we take for granted about the web... a system by which you could highlight words and images and turn them into links. I had dropped out of my Masters program and was working as a small time graphic designer in a small time nonprofit in San Francisco. I remember someone there telling me about it at work. I opened the program and took a look around... a week later I had quit my job and gone back to my Masters program.

I finished my degree in about six months. I wrote my thesis using HyperCard to demonstrate what I was talking about, creating a nonlinear piece of fiction that was sort of like a library, footnoted with links. I had discovered a nonlinear process of digression, really, that allowed for all sorts of links and asides, suites of influence, worlds.

About seven years later, I ended up designing an English class for the Distant Ed department of a small community college that was trying to go online. The Internet was such that the World Wide Web was just one part of it... it hadn't taken over yet, hadn't "become" the Internet. I went back to programming and learned HTML, much easier to work with than Basic, and a whole lot clearer to me what I wanted to do with it... build a website. Simple. But still, I'm a writer not a programmer. I fell short again, couldn't make the language do what I was hoping, came up with something that sort of fit the image. I'd already found the poem about How to Build an Owl, was using it in my teaching, so it was an easy step to calling the thing an OWL.

I really don't think Purdue had come up with that yet, but it's so obvious that someone besides me was bound to stumble onto it. So, I think it was 1996 when I built the prototype. Then it all got lost. I went back to school and moved in a different direction and only came back around to the Internet when I published my novel and decided to build my own website. Tools had changed. It was a whole lot easier.

So there you have it.

The OWL is actually built not of HTML pages, but of blogs. Entirely simple—a suite of blogs a friend called it. At least to begin with. It does go back and forth between some HTML pages the blogs. It's likely to grow too. Who knows—maybe before I'm done, I'll find myself in contact with extraterrestrials. That's the novel I've been trying to write since the 1970s, by the way.

For now, I'm just inviting you to visit my OWL. It's just getting started, so it's a little like inviting you to a house that hasn't been lived in yet. I'm moving in the furniture, painting walls, that kind of thing. And I'm also thinking about how to grow the thing. It does feel like a little creature of sorts, like its a little bit alive. And, well, it also feels like my future.

Cross-posted at  Ariadne's Owl