Hey everyone,

No apologies for cross-posting -- infospam uber alles! ;-)

Visualize This!

How can we 'see' a written text? Do you have a new way of visualizing writing on the screen? If so, then McKenzie Wark and the Institute for the Future of the Book have a challenge for you. We want you to visualize McKenzie's new book, Gamer Theory.

Version 1 of Gamer Theory was presented by the Institute for the Future of the Book as a 'networked book', open to comments from readers. McKenzie used these comments to write version 2, which will be published in April by Harvard University Press. With the new version we want to extend this exploration of the book in the digital age, and we want you to be part of it.

All you have to do is register, download the v2 text, make a visualization of it (preferably of the whole text though you can also focus on a single part), and upload it to our server with a short explanation of how you did it.

All visualizations will be presented in a gallery on the new Gamer Theorysite. Some contributions may be specially featured. All entries will receive a free copy of the printed book (until we run out).

By "visualization" we mean some graphical representation of the text that uses computation to discover new meanings and patterns and enables forms of reading that print can't support. Some examples that have inspired us:

Brad Paley's "Text Arc" Marcos Weskamp's "Newsmap" Chirag Mehta's "US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud" Kushal Dave's "Exegesis" CNET News.com 's "The Big Picture" "Visuwords" online graphical dictionary Christopher Collins' "DocuBurst" Stamen Design's rendering of Kate Hayles' "Narrating Bits" in USC's Vectors Brian Kim Stefans' "The Dreamlife of Letters" Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Understand that this is just a loose guideline. Feel encouraged to break the rules, hack the definition, show us something we hadn't yet imagined.

All visualizations, like the web version of the text, will be Creative Commons licensed (Attribution-NonCommercial). You have the option of making your code available under this license as well or keeping it to yourself. We encourage you to share the source code of your visualization so that others can learn from your work and build on it. In this spirt, we've asked experienced hackers to provide code samples and resources to get you started (these will be made available on the upload page).

Gamer 2.0 will launch around April 18th in synch with the Harvard edition.

Read GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 .

Download/upload page (registration required): http://web.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory2.0/viz/

------------------

The Institute for the Future of the Book is a small New York-based think tank dedicated to inventing new forms of discourse for the network age. Other recent publishing experiments include an annotated online edition of the Iraq Study Group Report(with Lapham's Quarterly) and Without Gods: Toward a History of Disbelief(with Mitchell Stephens, NYU). Read the Institute's blog, if:book .

McKenzie Wark teaches media and cultural studies at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City. He is the author of several books, most recently A Hacker Manifesto(Harvard University Press) and Dispositions (Salt Publishing).