faq — the plain questions

WTF is this?

One item — a single running thread — in a conferencing system, kept by nineteen writers for one year, September 2, 1997 to August 31, 1998. Each writer added numbered responses; the responses quoted, answered, and elaborated each other into a collaborative hypernarrative its editor called coelaboration. This site preserves the whole item: all 212 surviving responses in order, as the river; each response on its own page; the 29 lost numbers marked, not hidden. Nothing here is still running. It is a snapshot, in amber, of a room that closed in 1998. Start at 8:0 and read downstream, the way it was read.

What's an item? What's a response?

In Caucus, a conference is divided into items — numbered topics. An item is one thread: an opening text and its responses, each numbered in the order it was posted. Item 8, response 137 is written 8:137. People came back to a conference to read whatever was new since their last visit, and answered. All of this work is a single item — 241 responses were posted to it; 212 survive.

What's Caucus?

Conferencing software — the group-talk machinery of the pre-web and early-web years, before forums and feeds settled the shape of online talk. A Caucus conference is a place; inside it, items; inside items, responses, read in order. Item 8 was written at a text prompt, one response at a time; the cmd face of this site (flip the switch at the top) is what that screen felt like. The glossary has the fuller entry.

What's TMN? What's the artist conference?

TMN is The Meta Network, the online service whose conferences — run on Caucus — housed this work. One of its conferences was called artist. Item 8 lived there: item 8 of artist, a public item in a public room. The editor's thank-yous, printed on the what page, go to Scott Burns, to Caucus Systems, and to The Meta Network.

What's EFA?

Education for the Arts — a magnet program operated by K/RESA (next answer) for the schools of Kalamazoo County, Michigan. On TMN, EFA kept classroom conferences of its own — Classroom A and Classroom B, a Homeroom, a Café, a Publishing Area, an Authors Forum — next door to the Western Michigan University conferences. The editor scraped those conferences in November 1999, because he could see the lights going out; the scrape survives, and it is where the classroom side of this story is kept. EFA matters to this site as the neighborhood some of the writers came from — see the class answer below, which is a no.

WTF is K/RESA?

Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency — the regional agency that serves the public school districts of Kalamazoo County, Michigan. It operates EFA. In the 1990s it also ran the server many Kalamazoo students connected to TMN through; in the classroom record its initials are a lobby, a program, and a busy signal at once. That is the whole of it, and it is enough.

Was this a class?

No. Item 8 was a public item in a public conference, open to anyone on TMN. Nobody was assigned to write in it; nothing in it is coursework; it was not part of any program. People wrote because the room was there and the thread was alive.

The adjacency, stated exactly: some of the writers were Ginny Little's students, who found their way in from the classroom conferences on the same system — the way you wander out of a classroom and into the café next door, and stay for the conversation. And separately, as a fact about the people and not a frame for this work: Ginny co-taught an accredited online creative-writing course for EFA — one of the first of its kind in the United States — first with the editor, Chris Abraham; after Chris stopped, Dirk Flinthart also served as her co-teacher. That teaching circle is background. Item 8 itself was voluntary, public, and unassigned.

What is hyperfiction?

Fiction written for the screen's native moves — pieces of text joined to one another, more than one path through them, sometimes more than one writer — instead of a single line of print. Item 8's ancestor is My Name is Scibe (1994), a linked hyperfiction the editor co-wrote; item 8 is the experiment run again with the geometry changed, a river instead of a web. The glossary carries the fuller entry.

What is collaborative writing?

More than one writer making one work, each text answering and altering the others — as distinct from an anthology, where separate works merely share a cover. Writing classes play with it as a method, because a live reader who answers you is a different teacher than a deadline. Here the method had a name, coelaboration, and a visible mechanics: quote the response before you, answer it, extend it, hand the thread on changed. You can watch it happen — Hope's ashes (8:9) answered by Chris's (8:10), answered back (8:11), and carried downriver.

Why are 29 numbers missing?

Responses were numbered as they were posted, 8:0 to 8:240. Twenty-nine numbers appear in neither surviving copy of the transcript, and they were already gone from the editor's 1999–2000 export — most plausibly frozen or withdrawn in Caucus itself (a frozen response keeps its number and drops its text), or lost in that export. The run 193–199 looks like a single event. This edition prints the gaps in the river, gives each missing number a page of its own holding only the fact of the loss and the dates around it, and renumbers nothing. The colophon tells the whole story.

Why two faces — web and cmd?

Because the work had two lives. It was written and first read at an amber text terminal — that is cmd. In 2000 the editor re-housed it on his own website, in orange and white — that is web, the default. The switch at the top of every page flips the skin; the snapshot underneath never changes. Never serifs, either way.

Who wrote it? Who owns it? Can I make it come down?

Nineteen writers, listed on the writers page under the names they printed. Each response belongs to its writer; this edition asserts no new rights in the text and was made in good faith, to keep a fragile work alive. Any writer who objects to any part of it is asked to write — cabraham@gmail.com — and the site will come down or change, promptly and without argument. The colophon carries the same promise, and it governs.

Can I post a response?

No. The item closed on August 31, 1998 — the cessation of the exercise was, in the editor's words, completely arbitrary — and this site is a snapshot, not a revival. The water stopped in 1998 and stays stopped.