Cathy Marshall (hypertext developer)

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Cathy Marshall is a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley Lab and an author of electronic literature. She is affiliated with the Center for Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. [1] She has led a series of projects investigating analytical work practices and collaborative hypertext, including two system development projects, Aquanet (named after the hairspray) and VIKI. [2] Marshall is mainly interested in studying human interaction when mediated by technology. From her early experiences with hypertext, Marshall discovered the negative effects of having analysts work with formal representation. Marshall learned that information which does not fit in formal representation gets lost as people try to force it into this area. [3] Cathy has a 20-year history working with hypertext. [4]

Contents

Career as a researcher

Marshall worked at Xerox PARC for 11 years and Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Lab for one year. Cathy Marshall was also an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Texas A&M University. [5]

Literary work

Between 1993 and 1996, while working with PARC, Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall collaborated on Forward Anywhere: Notes on an Exchange between Intersecting Lives, a hypernarrative work based on electronic communication that passed between the two in which they sought "to exchange the remembered and day-to-day substance of our lives". [6] In the essay, "Closure was never a goal in this piece," the two, (Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall) share their experiences and thoughts about collaborating in "Forward Anywhere," excerpts of which can be found in the site itself. She has also produced works such as "Do Tags Work?" which is a narrative on the effectiveness of archive tagging on the internet.

Selected bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hypertext</span> Text with references (links) to other text that the reader can immediately access

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PARC (company)</span> American company

PARC is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a division of Xerox, tasked with creating computer technology-related products and hardware systems.

Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to human–computer interaction:

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.

<i>Patchwork Girl</i> (hypertext) Work of electronic literature by Shelley Jackson

Patchwork Girl or a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelly and Herself is a work of electronic literature by American author Shelley Jackson. It was written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate Systems in 1995. It is often discussed along with Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story as an important work of hypertext fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Yellowlees Douglas</span>

Jane Yellowlees Douglas is a pioneer author and scholar of hypertext fiction. She began writing about hypermedia in the late 1980s, very early in the development of the medium. Her 1993 fiction I Have Said Nothing, was one of the first published works of hypertext fiction.

Stuart Moulthrop is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works Victory Garden (1992), which was on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Reagan Library (1999), and Hegirascope (1995), amongst many others. Moulthrop is currently a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He also became a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999.

Eastgate Systems is a publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, which publishes hypertext.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab</span> Research lab at the University of Maryland, College Park

The Human–Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland, College Park is an academic research center specializing in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). Founded in 1983 by Ben Shneiderman, it is one of the oldest HCI labs of its kind. The HCIL conducts research on the design, implementation, and evaluation of computer interface technologies. Additional research focuses on the development of user interfaces and design methods. Primary activities of the HCIL include collaborative research, publication and the sponsorship of open houses, workshops and annual symposiums.

Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.

Judy Malloy is an American poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. Beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction. She was an early creator of online interactive and collaborative fiction on The WELL and the website ArtsWire.

Forward Anywhere is a hypertext narrative created by writer Judy Malloy and scientist Cathy Marshall. They started working together in 1993 through the PAIR program at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Malloy and Marshall were one of the first and only pairings of two women in the program "created to bring together scientists and artists, with the hope of initiating a dialog between the two communities, and creating what PAIR program director Rich Gold described as 'new art' and 'new research.'" The pair wrote of their experience working together in the article, "Closure Was Never a Goal in this Piece", explicating their collaboration process and the connections found between each other.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deena Larsen</span> American writer of electronic literature (born 1964)

Deena Larsen is an American new media and hypertext fiction author involved in the creative electronic writing community since the 1980s. Her work has been published in online journals such as the Iowa Review Web, Cauldron and Net, frAme, inFLECT, and Blue Moon Review. Since May 2007, the Deena Larsen Collection of early electronic literature has been housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink was an American writer, scholar, and teacher. Writing hypermedia fiction under the pen name M.D. Coverley, she is best known for her epic hypertext novels Califia (2000) and Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day (2006). A pioneer born-digital writer, she is part of the first generation of electronic literature authors that arose in the 1987–1997 period. She was a founding board member and past president of the Electronic Literature Organization and the first winner of the Electronic Literature Organization Career Achievement Award, which was named in her honor. Lusebrink was professor emeritus, School of Humanities and Languages at Irvine Valley College (IVC).

<i>Figurski at Findhorn on Acid</i>

Figurski at Findhorn on Acid is a hypertext novel by Richard Holeton published on CD-ROM by Eastgate Systems in 2001 and republished on the open web by the Electronic Literature Lab, Washington State University, in 2021. Re-Imagined Radio presented a radio interpretation of this novel in 2022 in which Holeton made an appearance. It is a work of interactive fiction with various paths for readers to choose from, an early example of electronic literature, and one of 23 works included in the literary hypertext canon.

Its Name Was Penelope is a hypertext fictional story created by Judy Malloy and published in 1993 by Eastgate Systems. The work makes use of digital elements such as randomized passages to tell the story of the main character's life.

References

  1. "Affiliated researchers at CDSL TAMU". Archived from the original on 2021-09-21.
  2. "Forward Anywhere." Eastgate: Serious Hypertext. Web. 26 Oct. 2009. <http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/ForwardAnywhere.html>.
  3. "Cathy Marshall Interview"
  4. Hafner, Katie (22 July 1999). "I Link, Therefore I Am: A Web Intellectual's Diary". The New York Times.
  5. 1 2 Malloy, Judy (November 16–21, 2016). "Social Media Narrative: Issues in Contemporary Practice". Narrabase. Rutgers Camden DSC Class in Social Media Narrative. Retrieved November 21, 2022.
  6. The Independent, 6 April 1997. Marek Kohn, Technofile. Retrieved on April 29, 2009.