Synthetic-Analytic Approach
This paper introduces concepts and vocabulary that provide a way to understand and discuss how templates influence authoring. The concepts were developed from a study of template-based systems in three popular genres for private expression: home pages, weblogs, and home video.
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For the home pages, I have used templates from Yahoo! Geocities, Mac.com, and Microsoft PowerPoint X. For weblogs, Blogger, Fotolog, Moveable Type 2.661, and Tinderbox 2.0 were chosen, while home video was edited with iMovie 2 and iDVD 2 from Apple.
The study was undertaken in the autumn of 2003, and several of the tools have changed since the study was undertaken. The online services do not have version numbers, but as of May 2005, Blogger has undertaken two significant upgrades, and Mac.com has added several templates to their offering. The features discussed in Fotolog and Yahoo! Geocities are not changed. Hopefully the principles discussed in this paper will still apply to the newer versions.
The selection of templates is not meant to be representative of any larger "population" of tools. They are selected for two reasons: first because they are popular, in that they are widely used by home users, and are also very visible on the web as they are either backed by major companies (Geocities, Mac.com, Microsoft, Blogger, Apple), or have a very devoted user base (Fotolog, Moveable Type, Tinderbox); and secondly because they were as different in their prescripts as possible among the popular tools.
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The templates were studied with a synthetic-analytic approach. Developed by Gunnar Liestøl
, the synthetic-analytic approach combines insights from textual analysis with insights from actual design and authoring. In my case, the research was done in three steps.
1. Creating with the template. First, I simply made home pages, blogs, and films the way the template invited them to be made.
2. Creating beyond the template. In the second phase, I tried to change the style of my pages and films to distance myself from the genres the templates were designed to accommodate. As I tried to make something different, I soon found that much of what I wanted to do was difficult or even impossible to accomplish.
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These extensions were partly based on actual genre examples, such as experimental blogs and digital films. For home pages, I consulted some of the many "best practice" books on web design. (Among the most influential were Darell Sano
, Jeff Veen
, Jakob Nielsen
and Steve Krug
.) I also partly based my experiments on theories about hypertext and digital media in general, such as those by Jay David Bolter
, George P. Landow (Hypertext
and 'Rhetoric'
), Ted Nelson
, and Lev Manovich
. The purpose of this was to distance myself from the genres the templates were designed to accommodate. This is a way of using theory (analysis) to create something new (synthesis), which in turn casts new light on the study object (analysis).
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3. Creating new templates. Based on the analysis in step 2, I created experimental templates that afford other features, thus showing further the limitations of the original templates.
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I identified genre features that should be important according to theory books and best practice examples, but are not afforded by the templates. I then created experimental templates that incorporate these features.
(The new Web templates are made in Tinderbox, a hypertext application with powerful scripting abilities and support for "wizards," small scripts that helps a fresh user in setting up a new text from a complex template. The templates and wizards will be made available for download on the Web. The DVD project is made in Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro, and can only be made available as an example of a different genre. Documentation of all these sub-projects will be published in separate papers.)
The point is not to argue that my templates are "better" or "more advanced." Our aim is a theoretical understanding of the prescripts and their importance for the finished products. It is very clear that my new templates in return for their new features necessarily will be less effective for some of the genre traits the original templates offer.
In the present webtext, I will not focus in detail on every template that is tested, or on the new ones created. Neither will I criticize the many shortcomings of the templates.
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I will give a systematic overview of the ways I found that templates influence what authors can create. I will conceptualize these as prescripts and provide a typology of their different kinds before discussing concept of prescripts in a broader context.