Contributors

Welcome to project textbender. We are developing recombinant text, a new medium of collaborative design and composition.

Work is on hold. Please see http://reluk.ca/project/textbender-tasks.html.

Overview of the Project • Opportunities • Acknowledgments • Notes

Overview of the Project

Initial development is aimed at creative literature. But most of the software will be easily transferable to other applications, as well.

Goal

Benefiting Artists

The medium promises benefits for poets and writers, from engaging in critical dialogue to exploring new forms of art.
Groundwork and Theory

The Medium of Recombinant Text

The technology is well grounded in theory. Connections to other fields have been drawn. Application areas have been outlined, and use cases explored in prototype.
Latest Development Results

Textbender Alpha Demonstration

We have an alpha prototype of a collaborative writing toolkit. The next step toward beta is a design review by users. This will be an open review, focused primarily on creative literary composition — we invite all poets and writers to participate.

Opportunities

Test Artist • Entrepreneur • Researcher
Editor, Technical Writer • Engineer

Test Artist

Master the tools, explore the medium, pioneer a new form of art. We need artists who can guide software engineers through an unknown, half-formed medium, all the while handling tools that are barely off the drawing board, and barely tested. Needless to say, it's not a job for everyone. It may be difficult at times, and often frustrating (it's fair to warn): test artists will routinely discover design problems and technical glitches, large and small; and then have to wait as we work through them, one by one. The worst of these difficulties and delays will be overcome in the earliest stages of alpha testing. (For those who would prefer to wait, you can follow our progress by joining the discussion group.)

On the other hand, for those undeterred by the difficulties, early involvement offers advantages. Not least is the chance to take a leading role in the design of a new medium,1 and the creation of a new form of art. If you are interested, the place to start is the alpha demonstration. You may have glanced over it already. What we ask, though, is that you actively work in it (as far as its shortcomings allow) in order to get an artistic sense of where the medium is going — toward what possibilities? toward what pitfalls? — and then to come back, and share your insight and advice. Please see the reporting guidelines at the end of the demo.

We have no test artists yet. Some writers and poets have expressed an interest. Many are Mac users though, and textbender does not support that platform yet. (We are looking for a Mac/Java software engineer to help with that.)

Although development of the prototype toolkit is on hold, pending the design review, work can still proceed on other lines. Other opportunities remain open:

Entrepreneur

Profit from it. Recombinant text has a range of possible applications. At least two of them have obvious commercial potential as business management applications: brainstorming and decision support. If you are interested, you may want to follow our discussion group, and keep up to date with the project.

Researcher

Recombinant text draws its basic theory and practice from the fields of biology, information technology, and fine arts. In theory, it may also be connected with classical and pre-literary studies. In practice, its more advanced implementations will depend on novel applications of statistics to resolve and transfer complex variations.* We need to forecast its interplay with established law, and recommend the most effective organization, forms of legal contract, and so forth, for the collective ownership of its creations. Finally, the medium has potential applications in open democracy and utopian literature that might interest scholars in several fields.

Among these various connections, graduate students might see a thesis. Professional academics might see possibilities of research and funding. If you are thinking along these lines, please join our discussion group and keep in touch.

Editor, Technical Writer

Organize and compose documentation and Web pages. Both the released documentation and the Web site are straight copies of the project's codebase. The codebase is open to editing via Mercurial. Instructions follow in the next section.

Engineer

Build the components and subsystems, help design an emerging Web 3.0 medium. The code is mostly Java. You can browse it on the Web site and in the API docs. To obtain a working copy:

  1. Ensure you have Mercurial installed.

  2. Create a new working copy from the codebase trunk:

    hg clone http://reluk.ca/var/db/repo/textbender/ working-copy

    This creates a directory ‘working-copy’. (You can freely rename it, or move it.)

  1. Test build the code. (Technical writers can skip this step.)

  1. You can then proceed to modify the code.

When you are done, ‘hg commit’ will permanently record your changes in the working copy's repository. You can then share your work, either by publishing your working copy/repo to the Web — using ‘hg serve’ or ‘hgweb.cgi’ — or by email, using ‘hg bundle’.

If you make improvements, please send your repo URI (or bundle) to the maintainer for inclusion in the next release.2

Acknowledgments

Most contributors will be acknowledged directly in the project files, either as authors or sources.

Authors

Contributing authors acknowledge themselves in the files they contribute to. Ordinarily, the acknowledgment is part of the file's embedded licence. For example, see the embedded licence at page bottom.

Co-authors and later contributors may append their names and extend the copyright year. For example:

Copyright 2007-2008, First Author, Second Author. Permission is hereby granted...

Sources

Authors acknowledge contributing sources in the usual fashion (citations, footnotes, and so on) within the relevant files.

Notes

1.

The prospect of design leadership for artists is based on the application's specialized utility (artists' medium, and artists' tools), and the openess of the project's structure and licence. Given these, should artists ever find that their insight or advice is being ignored, they will be free to copy the project as a whole, and go in a separate direction with it. Some of them, after all, will be engineers as well as artists. And the other engineers left behind, what choice would they have but to follow?

In the end, the overall design is likely to be a collaborative effort between artists and engineers. Artists will have the most say in the design of the human interfaces (which affect them directly), and also the practical utility of the tools (features) and their performance. Engineers will have the most say in the system's infrastructure, which is largely invisible to the users, and has potential applications that extend beyond art, into other domains.

But at this juncture, only the artists can lead the way forward. Development of the alpha prototype is on hold, pending their participation. They've expressed an interest, so it would be imprudent to proceed to beta without them. (We'll work on other parts of the medium, meantime.)

2.

Acceptance of code changes cannot be guaranteed. On the other hand, if your changes were ever to be rejected, you could easily carry on with them in complete freedom, even in collaboration with others. Each working copy of the codebase can double as a bona-fide project branch, or even a separate project. Mercurial is flexible enough, therefore, to allow work to proceed in parallel on both sides of a dispute, until the dispute is eventually resolved; either by a merger, or by a fork.

Forks are not always to be discouraged. Unlike other projects, the focus is not so much on software development, but on exploring a new medium. Multiple projects will be needed to cover the ground, in different directions. Most of the map is still blank.

maintainer Michael Allan
textbender java.net SourceForge.net

Copyright 2007, Michael Allan. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Textbender Software"), to deal in the Textbender Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicence, and/or sell copies of the Textbender Software, and to permit persons to whom the Textbender Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The preceding copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Textbender Software. THE TEXTBENDER SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE TEXTBENDER SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE TEXTBENDER SOFTWARE.