Nancy’s Blog

I’ve recently been introduced to Sophie, software for creating “books” that incorporate text, images, video, and audio:

Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins….Funded by grants from the Mellon and Macarthur foundations and the University of Southern California, Sophie is free and entirely open-source.

So far, I’ve only played with it a little. Friday I’m going to see the products of an archeology class that has used it — will write more then. The most serious limitation is that it requires its own reader, so it cannot (at this point, anyway) be used to produce “papers” on the web. But it looks intriguing. Well worth checking out.

NY Times Magazine article yesterday:
“An Interface of One’s Own” by Virginia Heffernan

She describes several wordprocessing programs designed for writers, including Scriverner, Nisus Writer, and others. I plan to try at least a couple.

UPDATE: They’re all for Mac.  Sigh.

For those who think I’m too concerned about commas and other grammatical details: from today’s NY Times.

October 25, 2006
The Comma That Costs 1 Million Dollars (Canadian)
By Ian Austen

OTTAWA, Oct. 24 — If there is a moral to the story about a contract dispute between Canadian companies, this is it: Pay attention in grammar class.

The dispute between Rogers Communications of Toronto, Canada’s largest cable television provider, and a telephone company in Atlantic Canada, Bell Aliant, is over the phone company’s attempt to cancel a contract governing Rogers’ use of telephone poles. But the argument turns on a single comma in the 14-page contract. The answer is worth 1 million Canadian dollars ($888,000).

Citing the “rules of punctuation,” Canada’s telecommunications regulator recently ruled that the comma allowed Bell Aliant to end its five-year agreement with Rogers at any time with notice…

The dispute is over this sentence: “This agreement shall be effective from the date it is made and shall continue in force for a period of five (5) years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five (5) year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.”

The regulator concluded that the second comma meant that the part of the sentence describing the one-year notice for cancellation applied to both the five-year term as well as its renewal. Therefore, the regulator found, the phone company could escape the contract after as little as one year…

To bolster its appeal, Rogers commissioned a 69-page affidavit, mostly about commas, from Kenneth A. Adams, a lawyer from Garden City, N.Y., who is the author of two books on contract language. It disputes the regulator’s analysis of what Mr. Adams calls “the rule of the last antecedent.”