Reader and Read

Much of the point of this hypertext is that our texts are beginning to enjoy us in the same way that we enjoy them. We're a short step (or perhaps a short glance back) from visualizations of Amazon tracking the connections between the philosophers we read and the practitioners we reference. [1.1MB version of the clip above]

These are more than pretty pictures: Information visualizations of textual activity sugest new ways to think about the processes of reading and writing. What might we learn from the information activities of expert writers? From emergent novice writers?

What might texts become when we routinely think of them less as static, freestanding entities and more as programs and information spaces?

We need to think of our job more as teaching interaction design (rhetoric, design, communication, production) and not as just teaching writing (a limited view). Interaction design is to writing as rhetoric is to form.