Category: Tools

Interesting new way of distributed collaboration…

TextBender is a system of collaborative writing based on recombinant text,
textbender has these characteristics:

*Your text belongs to a population, one text per author.
*Quality bits of text are swapped among authors, peer to peer.
*Individual authorship is retained and traceable throughout.

Textbender is currently ”’aimed at creative writing”’, particularly at short verse. A demonstration is being prepared.

Recombinant text is a medium of collaborative design and composition, with a basis in biological theory. In computer science, it belongs to the subfield of human-based genetic algorithms. In biological terms, it is analogous to population genetic engineering; but with populations that consist of texts.

The texts are Web documents. Intercommunication is by Web protocols, and the result is the collaborative production of Web content. Recombinant text is therefore ”’comparable to a Wiki”’. But it differs in its distributed architecture and ”’peer-to-peer communication pattern”’ (populations), ”’formalized data units”’ (genes), and ”’semantic labels”’ (loci). These place it in the arena of Web 3.0.

Several design approaches to recombinant text have been investigated to date. The ultimate approach (below top) would rely on a mechanism of gene complexing to transfer variations of plot, character, and other patterns from text to text. This approach would have a range of groupware applications in general design, as well as literary and musical composition. It would also be difficult to realize, and remains a vision for the future.

[http://zelea.com/project/textbender/ Read more on TextBender] or [http://zelea.com/var/cache/textbender-demo/textbender/a/b/demo/instructions.xht try the TextBender demo].