Stéfan Sinclair and Stan Ruecker The Digital Play Book : An Environment for Interacting with Play Scripts

Stéfan Sinclair and Stan Ruecker / © ctr 127 Summer 2006 Based on a consideration of the vast majority of electronic texts currently available (especially on the Internet), it would be easy to conclude that electronic texts are merely digital counterparts to print-based texts, albeit in a much more convenient format for indexing (as Google does) and interlinking (as HTML – the common formatting language of the web – allows). Such a conclusion would be a natural and justifi ed perception of how electronic texts are generally represented, but – we would argue – these representations lamentably belie the potential of electronic texts for other types of rich processing and display. Underlying this potential is the fundamental nature of all that is digital, that is, all that is stored as a collection of discreet units of information (bits) and therefore infi nitely reconfi gurable and modifi able. For the last few years, we have been experimenting with various mechanisms for exploiting some of the “affordances” (potential capabilities) of certain types of electronic text used by humanities scholars. Many of these experiments have sought to marry our combined expertise in visual design and text analysis with particular attention to the more playful aspects of texts. (Our desire is to create tools that may be useful but also appealing, engaging and sometimes just plain fun.)