Retrenchment, Day 48

One of the cool things I'm getting the benefit of, as I revise the American Environmental History textbook in preparation for updating the course and making it available online, is that the textbook has 325 annotations in Hypothesis, where my students have commented and asked questions. As I'm re-editing the chapter content, I can review the feedback in order to understand what confused my readers, what they'd like more info on, etc. I'm thinking of additional links to outside sources as well. I'm getting more excited about revising this text and making the media connections more fun to follow.

When I was an undergrad, back in the 80s, there used to be a very simple Dungeons and Dragons-style game hidden in one of the campus computer systems. I think it was on the VAX system that ran Continuing Education's registration application (although students still registered on a three-part carbonless form and my work-study job mostly involved filing those forms alphabetically in dozens of file drawers). But in any case, it was an extremely simple game. You would type an instruction into the text-only terminal and it would respond. Something like "pick up the sword" and the game would say, "Okay, you've picked up the sword. But you put down your torch and now you're standing in the dark."

As basic as that game was, we would spend hours after work, a bunch of people clustered around a single terminal, making suggestions of what to do next and waiting for the glowing green letters of the responses. Part of the attraction was that computers were brand new and none of us had regular access to them. But also, even that minimal amount of feedback and the possibility of being surprised was enough to keep us glued to the screen. I mention this, because I'm hoping to make my new format for my Environmental History text fascinating enough that people will follow these trails and pull on these threads of the slightly more distributed presentation to see where they lead.

I wonder whether I should include some additional interactive elements, in addition to the "choose your adventure" aspect of deciding on each page where they might want to go next? In the past I've thought about doing a really granular story where every moment was only a sort-of card and people would have to choose very regularly. I think that taught me that it's possible to overdo that feature. There's probably a sweet spot between a narrative that's completely determined by the author and a completely random walk through the content where anything could happen. In fiction, it could be the difference between being plot-driven on the one hand and focusing on character or setting on the other. In history there are some similar issues. Sometimes a quickly-moving narrative with a lot of impressive action can distract readers from subtlety or complication. The same rhetorical techniques are used, after all, in all these forms of writing. The reader's mind fills in gaps the author leaves, to make the story-world appear as seamlessly real as possible. That's not necessarily a great thing for histories, since those leaps of intuition we make to fill these gaps might be anachronistic.

But I'm probably getting a bit off course here. I'm also wondering whether this is really a "retrenchment diary" anymore if I'm starting to use this space to talk about my writing project or Open Ed work. On one hand, I'm focusing on these issues and projects much more intensely because of the retrenchment and my impending career change. On the other, I have sections for Open Ed, Note-Making, Primary Sources, Historiography, etc. So maybe I should ask readers and viewers: should I talk about this stuff in these retrenchment posts? Stop the retrenchment posts and focus on the new stuff? Or drop the daily retrenchment posting and just say something about BSU when there's something to say about news or changes? Three choices to respond to. I won't promise like Elon to do whatever the majority says. But I'm curious.