Discussion of Bob Stein: The Evolution of Reading and Writing Presentation

From WRIT-2510 Spring 2007 Wiki

This is a discussion of Bob Stein's speech on the evolution of reading and writing.

[edit] Matthew Fyffe's Comments

Unfortunately, I had to leave early, so I left around the time he was showing web sites which featured comments from users about current books. I'll divide my comments into two sections, things that impressed me, and things that weren't all that exciting. Later, when I get the chance to use Sophie, I might extend my discussion to include that.

I was really impressed by Bob Stein's early work, where in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he seemed to be on the cutting edge of the remediation of books. His cd/books such as Who Built America? and other similar works showed some of the potential for utilizing computers to expand upon books. His ideas seemed straight out of Bolter as he talked about the power of books to be read any way a reader pleased. His work with digitized books seemed to promote the remediation as he made it a more interactive book in which users could draw from other sources of information at the click of a button and watch videos instead of still images.

However, Stein's later showings about his current works with books that include comments from the computers and user-produced projects did not impress me very much. His display of Gamer Theory, in which building up to the book, the author was posting on a blog and receiving comments about the book from his readers was interesting, but nothing I feel is new and revolutionary. Many authors, game developers and musicians post their progress on their works on blogs and receive comments and support from their audience. In addition, his features of user-made electronic books did not seem that impressive. While I can't recall anyone else doing this in the past, it did not seem such an incredible creation that it would stand out in today's technological universe. Unfortunately, Stein never gave a date on when he released this feature so perhaps it was innovative at the time.

Overall, I enjoyed the presentation by Stein and it was nice to see that someone else in the world actually cares about the stuff Bolter talked about. It was interesting to see the directions writing has moved in and I'm glad I was able to be there for the hour that I was.

[edit] Ryan Bobrowski's Comments

I got to see the entire presentation by Bob Stein, including his demonstration of Sophie. One thing I didn't realize until the speech is that he is the man responsible for the Criterion DVD Collection. Being a big movie fan, it was exciting to be up close and personal with such an innovator in that field.

The presentation was short but pretty interesting, and I liked some of his ideas. As Matt mentioned, most of us have seen or used blogs/commenting systems before, so that wasn't all that groundbreaking, but Bob is all about innovation, and I feel like in the future his work will help pave the way for some new methods of collaboration not only on the Internet, but in books as well. The one thing that troubles me is, as one person in the audience commented on, is differing views and opinions on different subjects. How could we have books that are based on collaborative information when there are so many sides to an issue? This is one thing that will be tough to overcome, but on the other hand, Wikipedia is just one example of how it can work.

Sophie was extremely exciting to learn about. Sophie is a multimedia assembly tool that allows for extremely easy integration of movies, pictures, text, and more. It is like a combination of Word and Power Point, on crack. You can drop a picture or movie onto text and the text will wrap around it instantly. You can create timelines with any condition you want; for example: when the user clicks on a certain word, the next page in the document will come up in 10 seconds, and then the movie on that page will start playing. At the same time, the word "Hello" will flash on the bottom of the movie's frame every 3 seconds. You can also embed remote movies from the Internet into the document. There are a ton of other features, and the best part is that it is very easy to use. An early version is already available for download at http://sophieproject.org/download.

The presentation was short and sweet, and it was great to hear from someone who is committed to bringing his fresh new ideas to life.