It’s fun reading the collaboratively written report – must have been fun writing it too!

I’ll try to collect my thoughts on the conference and post them on my blog in the next day or so. I warned Noah that they might not be too nice.

Update: This phone has an RJ45 port available for use for $1.50 an hour! And me with my ethernet cable right here. Hooray for telcos and pay phones. Now I can go delete 200 spam emails during the next hour … and I thought I might not be able to do anything productive …

My distinction between scriptons and textons is NOT between surface and depth, but “between strings as they appear to readers, and strings as they exist in the text, since these may not always be the same. ” (Cybertext, p 62.)

The example I use in my definition, Queneau’s Cent Mille…, illustrates this: there is no surface versus depth in the text, only combinatorics that takes place on the surface.

The only difference I am able to tell between my terms and Kate’s from this short description is that mine are more general; they also address non-narrative phenomena such as experimental hyperliterature and poetry.

Disclaimer: I realize that this is not Kate’s position in her own words but as blogged by GtxtA, which as we all know tends to skew facts from time to time…

So, as you’ve written Espen, the term could not be more broadly applied and had at least some material (or computational) specificity.

Does this mean that only digital works have “possibility spaces”? And that texts like I Ching, Choose-your-own-adventure books and Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes do not? (And what about digital versions of the above?)

If I dump all the text out of some interactive fiction source code (using a facility of Inform, for instance) or disassemble a story file and get all the text, I have the textons, as I understand it. If I play interactive fiction, I see scriptons. There is also the set of all possible ways that the textons can be arranged and presented to me as scriptons, the potential session texts of a particular work of IF. which seems to be the possibility space of that IF. No, this is not a new concept, but it is probably worth some attention.

Yes, I agree with Espen that a computer is not necessary here. If I bind the textons of Cent Mille Millard de poémes into two volumes, or if I taped several “pages” back together along the strips so that it is as if those pages were uncut, I would have the same textons, and could produce and look at something that would be a scripton in the original Cent Mille Millard de poémes as well, but there would be far fewer potential poems.

Incidentally, you don’t need anywhere near a dozen basic computational operations to build a general-purpose computer. It can all be done just using the true/false distinction and NAND. There is a small set of logic gates that are generally talked about, but those two elements can be used to build them and are all that is needed for general-purpose computing.

Aren’t combinatorics the core of computing, whether it is computing with electrons, sticks, or steam? If a computer is a programmable system that responds to rules and executes commands, wouldn’t this describe the systems of the I Ching and the Oulipo work?

I really don’t get what the purpose of defining a “possibility space” is, aside from providing a visualization of some operation, e.g. this book of ten pages can produce ten million unique (and very uninteresting) poems. This visualization quickly breaks down in the case of Nick’s operations on textons, where the “space” of potential readings is vast in comparison to the number of likely readings anyone is likely to encounter. (The possibility space becomes just so many monkeys on typewriters.)

Computation, on the other hand, can be thought of as a way of performing calculations on a generic, non-specialized machine. The compuation might be the calculation of a combinatorial operation, spewing out all the permuations of some text, but that is only one specific function of what computation can accomplish. And while combinatorics can be appealing to non-math people, there are most powerful tools like group theory, set theory, topology, &c, which would be much better tools for analysis of some possibility space.