SLS '07 Portland, Maine

1. Multi-implications of
multi-dimensional authoring;
or,
“everything you wanted to know about
geek herding, but were afraid to ask”
tim@menzies.us
CSEE, WVU
SLS 2007
Nov-2-07
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2. Curse of dimensionality
Good news, everyone: giant ants can’t take over the world
Square-cube law
e.g. grow 3 times
– 33 = 27 times
as heavy
– Legs, 27 times
weaker
Lesson: what works in the small has to change for the LARGE
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3. How big is multi-media?
3 hyperlinked pages, Testing that users of
can be read 15 ways: your multi-media
masterpiece can travel
1. 1
2. 1,2
to all paths
Standard
3. 1,2,3
assumptions of
20 hyper-linked pages
4. 2
essay writers
5. 2,3
– Connections=
6. 3
• 1018=
7. 1,3
8. 2,1
• 1,000,000,000,
9. 3,1
000,000,000
10. 3,2
That’s a lot of testing
11. 1,3,2
12. 2,1,3
– (We’ll come back to this)
13. 2,3,1
14. 3,1,2
15. 3,2,1
15 / 2 =
750 % 3

4. Many dimensions
to multi-media
Metaphor : e.g.
– stewardship (SimCity)
– adventure games (LOTR quest)
Visual style : e.g Rhetorical style; e.g.
– actors on a stage, – Team vs first person perspective
– race cars on a track – Strategic vs tactical (e.g. shooter games)
– Write once (and comment): Blogs
– Rewrite often (Wikis)
Ontology; e.g.
– Physical, mental, economic Formats: e.g.
– Binary: jpg, pdf, svg, msword,…
– Textual: ascii, html, xml, docx,…
Control : e.g
– Linear (turn to next page)
Platform; e.g.
– Hyper (turn to any damn place you
– Hardware: intel/ PowerPC
want)
– OS: windoze, linux, mac
– Search (computer-aided tuition
– Versions: vista, XP, leopard, tiger
controls where can go next)
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5. Each dimension has its own best
tools, its own required skills
metaphor
Specialized toolkits let you built this
stuff, fast visual style
– But only by eliminating most
choices
blogger
Now,at the birth of new media ...
– … do you really want to walk fixed SimCity
dimensions? wiki
– Are you doing new media or
control
“cliched” media?
– Should new media research try the
path less traveled?
(Btw, to write a multi-media Ph.D.,
generate art works at any two,
randomly selected parts of this space
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and discuss their deltas.)

6. How to tame the dimensionality problem:
crowd sourcing
You can do more if you
take more folks along with
you
Mars DVD
– Kendrick,
– Burgess,
– Markley,
– Higgs,
– Tripp
– Hamming
– Altmann,
– a gang of consultants
Biofutures DVD
– “Rhillip”,
– Burgess,
– a gang of consultants
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7. Our institutions actively
block crowd surfing
Fixated on ownerships or corporate property “rights,”
Academic institutions
– (read “tenure committees”)
– give little credence to
“team players.”
Yet modern media authors
– must enlist in an army
– to complete multi-dimensional
(And no “team” in “tenure”)
masterpieces.
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8. The open source advantage
Why is open source software so successful?
– Testing = $0
Linus’s law
– quot;given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”
– Given a large enough beta-tester and co-
developer base, almost every problem will be
characterized quickly and the fix will be
obvious to someone.
BTW, testing is not some post-hoc bolt-on
– Rather, it is feedback to build better products
– So multi-media authors aren’t finished when
they hit the “save button”.
• Testing is not “design-neutral”
– Experience with hammers, changes hammers
• Lucy Suchman’s situated action
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9. If lots of people are holding the pen,
the pen must change
Not “product” but
“architecture” for
creating “product(s)”.
Don’t write “stories”,
write “dependencies”
and “transforms”.
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10. Other changes
Group think
e.g. 6 people, 5months, conducting
– The gang, including you, negotiates a
experiments, writing results,
shared view of the emerging produce
40 page final report plus 2*PP slides
Licensing
– BSD, Creative Commons, GPL,…
Tools
– No proprietary product (No Microsoft,
no Director)
– No (few) binary formats (the text
advantage)
Environment
– Tight version control
– Apart from “it”, need installers of it, and
tools that walk the dependence graphs
Development process
– Take a depth breath…
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11. The development process
Not enough to just write “it”
Before writing “it”: 1/3
– plan the groups activities
After writing “it”: testing
– unit test
• test your bits
– Integration tests
• Can you bits even connect to
other bits
– system test
• Does everyone play well
together?
– Acceptance tests
1/2
• test on user groups
• ? multiple platforms/versions
1/6
(BTW, “coding” is what you 11
used to call “writing”)

12. Do you like the ten people
sitting next to you?
You’d better:
– The curse of dimensionality cometh
– Your neighbors just become your
most critical tool for completing
your next multi-media masterpiece.
But before you get together,
– Your going to need new pencils
– Change how you share/grow ideas
– Change how you work, day to day
on a project
– Change models of accreditation
• move beyond concepts of “I”,
• acknowledge “us.”
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13. Questions?
Comments?
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14. FAQ
(frequently asked questions)
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15. But we donít need all that since ....
“We are using a
COTS product”
COTS = commercial off-the-shelf software
– Which, presumably, the developers test.
– Right?
U.S.S. Yorktown missile carrier.
– Laid low by COTS
September 1997
– a divide-by-zero in some manually entered data
in a Windows NT application
• (legend has it, the Microsoft Access database program)
– Dead in the water for 2 hours 45 minutes
Note for testing: can you
2 May 1997 probe all paths within
– A previous loss of propulsion program as well as
all possible user inputs?
– Also due to software.
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16. But we donít need all that since ....
“Our multi-media isn’t
managing nuclear weapons”
No, but English
faculty have their own
“mission critical”
issues
Biofutures.
– Not-so-good
version control.
Robert Mitchell’s
tenure review
committee
– For several days
– Unclear if they were
given wrong disk
– One that would
not play
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