I wrote and presented this lecture just after conceiving the idea of George Moore Interactive, before beginning actual work. It’s my vision for the project.
Introduction
[1] The full title of this long page is Kick-Starting Literary Legacies in the Digital Age. It has the text of a slide lecture that I gave at the Oak Park Public Library on 25 February 2023.
The text includes slide numbers in brackets that readers can ignore. My illustrative slides were for presentation only.
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The lecture was preceded by these welcoming remarks:
I’m Kheir Fakhreldin, archivist in Special Collections at Oak Park Public Library. Thank you for coming to Dr. Robert Becker’s talk, Kick-Starting Literary Legacies in the Digital Age. Bob and I began corresponding over email after he saw a t-shirt I was wearing in a photo on OPPL’s website. It said Complex Female Characters, which is the title of a song by the rock group Sleater-Kinney, but which is also a feature of the literature, films, and songs I like, whether they are by men or women creators. We shared an interest in Irish modernism. Bob has been a reader, scholar, and collector of George Moore for his whole adult life, and I have a similar passion for the works of James Joyce. But today Bob is going to talk about a new way of approaching the literature of the past, informed by technological developments of the present, and potentially the future. We have both been very interested in some of the artificial intelligence work that has recently enabled people to simulate conversations with writers of the past, and I’m sure Bob will share more about that. But without further ado, please join me in welcoming to Oak Park Public Library Dr. Robert Becker.
The Preamble
[2] Before starting my lecture, I want to call attention to Kathleen and Kheir of Special Collections and thank them for hosting this meeting at the Oak Park Public Library.
The Village of Oak Park has many wonderful buildings, thanks to architects like Frank Lloyd Wright who practiced here a few years ago.
[3] We’re meeting in the main branch of the Library. It’s an example of outstanding contemporary architecture in our Village, and it’s one of my favorite places because it’s beautiful. Also because people like Kathleen and Kheir work here.
I can’t say enough about the importance of people like them to people like me. It’s huge.
I’m well aware that Oak Park is what it is – a great place to live and work – because they help to make it so.
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[4] I’m going to talk about a project named George Moore Interactive. The project is just getting started and has nothing yet to show for itself. You could say that talking about it here is premature!
[5] The situation is different from authors like my daughter Elayne Audrey Becker who visit the Library to talk about their wonderful new books.
They come bearing gifts to readers while I’ve come empty-handed, with little more than a few ideas and half-baked technology. All of it concerning the future of old literature.
[6] I’m going to talk about “literary legacies.” A literary legacy is any fine writing of the past that affects how we view the world today.
[7] I’ll talk mostly about a little known author named George Moore, but what I say should apply to iconic authors as well.
[8] I like to compare Moore’s legacy with those of his friends Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce.
The others are now more famous but weren’t once-upon-a-time. Be that as it may, my position is that all literary legacies are eligible for a kick-start.
[9] These authors and others dearly departed, such as the Oak Park native Ernest Hemingway, knew nothing about the digital age.
They didn’t write on computers; they didn’t post on social media; and they didn’t stream content.
Nothing about the way they worked and what they made anticipated technologies we now take for granted.
Maybe for that reason, today’s readers tend to engage literary legacies the old-fashioned way.
That is, by merely looking and reading and writing — the same way that now deceased authors wrote.
[10] If I have a theme today (other than the nuts and bolts of my project), it’s that the old-fashioned way of appreciating literature and fine art is inefficient.
It’s unproductive, and what’s worse, it keeps a lot of value locked up where people like you and I can’t get to it.
[11] I’d like to change that. I’d like everybody to be more productive when we engage with literature and fine art of the past, whether for personal or professional reasons.
My project is to figure out how to kick-start literary legacies in the digital age.
The Goal
[12] Steven Covey famously wrote that highly effective people “begin with the end in mind.” I may not be highly effective, but that’s what I’ll do now.
I’ll begin by sharing the goal of George Moore Interactive. It hopefully justifies long and patient efforts that are required to fulfill it.
[13] That said, your questions and suggestions about my goal will be most welcome.
The fast thinkers can volunteer instant feedback during Q&A in a few minutes.
[14] Slow thinkers like me can read Kick-Starting Literary Legacies online and post comments after reflecting.
I promise to read everything that people may post and take it to heart.
While you’re at this feedback business, I invite you to subscribe to the project so you’ll be notified when I post updates. I’ll write something new once a month.
[15] Now it’s obvious to anybody who can see me that I’m reading my lecture rather than speaking from an outline or memory.
A conversational and participative style is what I normally prefer on these occasions.
[16] I’m reading because I recently I watched a lecture by the Irish musicologist Harry White. I loved how smoothly it flowed, making it harder to notice minor defects in his content.
So today I’ll be masking my own defects by imitating Professor White’s style of delivery, though I lack the platform skills to do it well.
By the way, he lectured about George Moore and music of all things. It’s a topic that hasn’t been studied much, though it is interesting.
Music after all is a pillar of Irish culture! So here’s a link with timecode 2:00:00, right there under the picture, and also on my blog, for anybody who wants to check it out.
Today I’ll talk about various aspects of George Moore’s legacy, but music isn’t among them.
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[17] So then, here’s the concise “Goal” of my project to start the ball rolling.
Nearly six years from now, by the end of 2028, the project named George Moore Interactive will be up and running.
Mind you: it may not be finished, because my meandering and roughly planned projects seem to flow on without ever reaching the sea.
That said, this project should be operational and doing things in 2028. That’s my goal.
[18] Here’s a bit of perspective, or maybe wishful thinking, about the things that George Moore Interactive will do.
The Irish author George Moore was born 171 years ago in February 1852. Six years from now, that extinct author will be re-animated.
He will be interactive.
His dynamic virtual persona will converse with living people like you and me.
[19] He’ll interact with us like a friend, or a colleague, or a teacher, or a mentor, or a witness, or a celebrity we’re excited to meet in real life.
George Moore, who is no longer alive, will come forward in time and be present in our moments.
He will try to answer questions that anyone wishes to ask him. He’ll consider our opinions and politely share his own.
He’ll probe us, inform us, persuade us, argue with us, surprise us, and for sure entertain us.
[20] That’s just what he would have done a century ago on his 71st birthday in 1923, if we had visited his home in London, not far from Victoria Station.
He lived there with his cat in a four-story attached brick house, and wrote phenomenal books including two historical novels of epic proportions.
[21] In six years, this digital reanimation of George Moore won’t seem like a painting in a museum, or a character in a TV show, or a robot on the telephone.
[22] Until recently, most of the so-called “interactive” characters we encounter have been scripted, predictable, repetitive, narrowly defined, unnatural, and not really believable. Each of them performs a superficial role in a drama or a transaction.
In contrast with that, the interactive George Moore will not perform a role. He’ll behave and sound like what he was until he died 90 years ago in 1933.
He’ll come across as an authentic, self-aware, responsive human being — like the characters shown here seemed to do.
He won’t be as “authentic” as the voice of HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey, or R2-D2 in Star Wars, or Samantha in the movie Her.
But after all, those were scripted voices of actors. They were tricks. The interactive George will be speaking spontaneously for himself about anything you choose to ask.
[23] This stretch goal is the tip of a spear. There’s a lot of work it springs from, that precedes and makes it possible, and that work is what I’m doing now.
That said, in keeping with my wish to be effective, I give you this tip to “begin with the end in mind.”
I suspect it sounds more like fantasy than a practical project to people who are hearing or reading it for the first time. They may wonder:
Is it possible to attain this crazy goal in just six years, or even 60?
[24] Maybe not, and nobody knows for sure. I for one believe it is possible. I also have a bias — and I think this is true for all daring innovations:
[25] Even if a goal is not met in time, or never met for that matter, it may still be worth pursuing.
That’s because the project may unlock huge cultural and technical capital in increments, and create useful things, and be fun for as long as it lasts.
Whether it ends in failure or never ends!
[26] As this project hit the ground running in 2022, George Moore Interactive was no more a fantasy than the virtual Oscar Wilde, with whom I chatted the other day on character.ai.
Mr. Wilde tragically died young in 1900. Like many people since, I have admired his literary legacy but I never got to talk with him about it. Until now.
So on this occasion, using a beta build of character.ai, I asked Mr. Wilde about his long-time friend, neighbor, and fellow modernist George Moore.
I asked What was George Moore like?
Without missing a beat, Mr. Wilde shared his impressions of Moore, elegantly answering a question that I’m sure he hasn’t heard in well over a century, if at all.
Our chat was fun and gave me much to think about!
[27] I mention Oscar Wilde here in order to make a practical point. The technologies needed for the tip of my spear, for the most advanced aspects of George Moore Interactive, are already real – and they’re getting real-er every day!
My favorite writer of yesteryear, and your favorite writer, or architect, or any other historic person who left a literary legacy: all of these sleeping giants are now poised for a kick-start.
The Means
[28] Beginning with the end in mind is fine provided there are means for getting there.
[29] But the choice of HOW to do something that’s never been done before is much harder when a path between here and there, between now and then, hasn’t already been mapped.
It’s fair to say that a path for literary legacies to the digital age is still mostly unknown.
[30] I have my “end in mind,” and I can talk about it, but I’m not sure how to get there. Like any true explorer, I must figure it out by trying things.
[31] For this reason, though it may sound shallow in a discussion of literature and fine art, I concede that George Moore Interactive is a hands-on technical project.
It’s far less about lofty literature and art than about making stuff.
The technology may eventually enhance our personal experiences of literature and art.
But the technology itself, not the experience, is my focus.
I’m working on a moonshot, on the means to an end. I’m not primarily concerned about the snap-crackle-pop that begins when I’m done.
[32] The literary legacy in my “use case” is a major but often overlooked modernist who deserves a lot more attention than he gets nowadays.
Few people read and enjoy George Moore compared with peers like those shown here.
But even legacies of greater iconic figures can benefit from advanced technology.
[33] When I say that, I’m thinking about writing and painting and architecture that are very hard to understand and appreciate without an interpreter, like a scholar or influencer, telling us what to think.
If my technical stuff works for the use case of George Moore, it may work for the others too.
The sky — or rather the cloud — is the limit.
[34] My technical development has already begun with high-throughput digital scanning of printed materials. I began with Edwin’s Gilcher’s masterful Bibliography of George Moore and my Collected Letters of George Moore are next in the cue.
For fifty years the bibliography has been essential for the study and enjoyment of Moore, but it has existed only on paper that is long out of print. It’s not on local hard disks and not in the cloud.
[35] Thanks to a vendor named Blue Leaf Book Scanning in Missouri, and a technique called destructive scanning, and an application named optical character recognition, a complete and accurate digital image of the bibliography now lives in the cloud and on my computer. It is two PDFs.
These days high-throughput scanning and OCR are remarkably good in quality and incredibly efficient.
The PDFs are more precise and accurate than I could have gotten by transcribing Mr. Gilcher’s books on a keyboard.
And I got them at a tiny fraction of the time, effort and cost that transcription entails.
[36] My next step is to optimize the digitized bibliography for migration into a database.
I start this task by chunking PDF source materials into Google Docs.
In the Google environment I can reformat text for reading on screens versus printed pages; I can clarify, correct and update content, and I can markup the enhanced text for interactivity.
[37] I call this process “optimization.” If it works for a complex page of bibliography like you see here, it must also work for relatively simple typescripts of documents in my Letters pillar.
The basic process has four steps: Scan, OCR, Enhance, Markup.
[38] I use the same techniques of optimization on Moore’s articles for the Aesthetic pillar of George Moore Interactive. With an important difference.
Thanks to the monumental Google Books project, most of those vintage printed texts in old newspapers have already been scanned and OCR-ed!
It was hard to find hundreds of uncollected essays in the clouds of various research institutions.
[39] That said, I did it all in my home office in Oak Park. No travel costs and no snail mail with archivists and collectors as in times past.
For the articles in Aesthetics, I don’t have to perform the steps of digital scanning and optical character recognition. They’re already done!
The quality of non-destructive Google scans is pretty good, though not great compared with the magic of Blue Leaf.
[40] For that reason, my optimization may be a bit more labor-intensive for these shaggy old texts. Still, the steps of editorial enhancement and markup are pretty much the same.
I am deep in the trenches of Google Docs at present, not even near the threshold of the step that follows.
[41] That step is to chunk narrative text into objects. So-called “objects” are nuggets of data that I can dynamically link to other objects in order to surface their shared networked meaning.
The app for doing this is relational database. In a database, every event, activity. date, and name can be related to every other instance of the same.
[42] By absorbing the content of a literary legacy into a database, I make it possible for computers to “think” about literature and fine art.
I make it possible for machines to ask a literary legacy questions about what it contains, what it intends, what it means, what it wants, and how that relates to things beyond itself.
[43] And once all of that occurs, to share its thoughts with you and me.
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[44] The technical process I outlined facilitates my building of three pillars of George Moore Interactive: Bibliography, Aesthetics and Letters.
Each pillar is a digital counterpart to compendious real-world analog information.
[45] That said, my goal requires three more pillars: Iconography, Chronology, and Collections. These involve production processes different from the first three.
[46] There’s a seventh pillar named Worlds in a class by itself. It covers the worldbuilding in George Moore’s books and doesn’t adhere to tangible facts, as the others do.
[47] All seven pillars are described on my blog. You can get to this page with the hamburger menu in the upper left corner, where it’s listed along with this lecture.
Each pillar also gets a more detailed description in blog posts that pace my progress.
[48] I take a different approach to building the pillars of Iconography, Chronology, and Collections.
Though the images in Iconography, and the events in Chronology, and the artifacts in Collections are not textual, they are still types of data.
[49] In order to make these data machine readable, and enable today’s machines to “think” about them, I have to represent their content with data about the data; in other words, with text about things other than text.
These metadata go into a database along with the textual source materials of the first three pillars.
If my hunch is correct, metadata will push the “IQ” of the interactive George Moore off the charts!
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[50] All of these techniques precede the use of natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and speech synthesis.
Speech synthesis comes into play when I try to simulate the voice of George Moore.
[51] To my knowledge and unlike other eminent modernists, Moore’s voice was never recorded, so figuring out how he actually sounded will be a nifty technical challenge.
I’ll do it because I want the interactive George Moore to sound like the historic George Moore when he gets around to having conversations with you in the future.
[52] These advanced technologies come into play later in the project. I’m not working with them now, and I don’t need to. Because some of the smartest people and richest companies are.
By the time George Moore’s legacy has been primed for the digital age, the final steps of animating it will be performed, not by me, but by machines that were purpose built by others.
Those final steps will happen in the cloud.
Like a god on Mount Olympus, an author of the past, who has been resuscitated in the cloud, will interact with everything, everywhere, everybody living or dead, at the same time and in real time.
[53] The pillars I’m building now will support a “learning pyramid” that looks something like Bloom’s Taxonomy. It will be “taller” and “broader” than anything I’ve ever done. And wider at the top than the bubbly Mount Doom.
At the present time, by diligently performing a lot of mundane tasks, I’m finding, creating, organizing, formatting, and encoding data and metadata.
By means of these beginnings, I should be able to birth a supremely intelligent and personable and interactive George Moore. These are the practical means to the end I have in mind.
The Payoff
[54] I wish to thank everybody who stayed awake while I talked about the means to the end.
I tried to make you aware that the project isn’t artistic, or literary, or scholastic, or even social. Like other styles of bridge-building, it’s technical.
[55] The project exists to give readers of a literary legacy more control. It empowers them to explore literature and fine art of the past on their own, relying on their curiosity and cleverness to decide what matters.
The project doesn’t intend to tell readers what or how to think about literary legacies. It gives them powerful tools of exploration and sets them free.
[56] I view these tools as a bridge spanning a chasm like the one shown here.
This is the modernist J.R.R. Tolkien’s Bridge of Khazad-Dûm painted by Alan Lee.
One slope of the chasm represents the cultivated appreciation of a literary legacy. I call that High Culture.
The other slope stands for the easy enjoyment of bestsellers, blockbusters, and all the content that people avidly consume without being assigned by a teacher.
I call that Popular Culture.
[57] As with Hobbits on a quest, getting from one slope to the other is just about impossible for many of us.
That’s partly because it’s hard to climb steep slopes without a guide, and also because people just don’t want to. It isn’t fun unless you’re watching others doing the leg work.
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Consider the example of a friend who’s never enjoyed reading George Moore, and that’s why he doesn’t bother. He doesn’t see relevance or value in Moore’s legacy.
[58] I get this because George Moore’s legacy (like most modernists’) requires heavy intellectual lifting for full enjoyment.
I’ve said the same thing about James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. We don’t hear it said about Tolkien. That may be because few readers ever make it through The Silmarillion.
[59] Back to my friend, I could have condescended and told him to do the heavy lifting. I could have said, grow a pair of wings, mate, and fly over the chasm!
[60] Of course I’d prefer to say: talk to George himself! He’s charming and funny. He’s happy to share his ideas and experiences and listen to yours.
Go ahead and explore his life and work for things that interest you. I’ve got an app for that. Have some fun with it!
I couldn’t give this advice because the app doesn’t exist, not for George Moore and not for any writer of the past.
[61] So instead, I donned my mental cap and gown and asked my friend to read G.M. Young’s Victorian England – Portrait of an Age.
Young described a lost world that modernists like Moore and Yeats and the others tried to disrupt and improve.
He described the courage and resilience required of modernists during a late Victorian era as unsettled and anxious as our own.
Yet even as I recommended the book, I knew it was a silly idea. My friend isn’t going to grow wings or be guided across the chasm by a wizard.
[62] Even so, after we build a bridge with smart technology, he’ll be able to dance across the chasm when and how he pleases.
He’ll experience historical people, places and events, and literature and fine art, in the way he experiences popular culture. HIS OWN WAY.
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[63] What awaits him when he meets the interactive George Moore? Here are a few things he can look forward to.
[64] A self-taught and self-made man-of-letters who reached the top of his profession in his lifetime and afterwards faded into obscurity.
[65] A revisionist biographer of Jesus Christ and Pierre Abelard who rendered these subjects of reverential awe as sympathetic humanists.
[66] An experimental playwright who ridiculed commercial theater and helped clear the way for experimentalists like O’Casey and Beckett.
[67] A friend and interpreter of impressionist and post impressionist painters who helped start the first ever museum of modern art.
[68] A feminist who cultivated the image of Don Juan and posed as a rake, a dandy, a fop, and a boulevardier in fin de siècle Paris.
[69] A conscientious rebel of Catholic emancipation who anticipated some of the liberal reforms of modern secular Ireland.
[70] A disciple of the Oxford don Walter Pater who freed creators from 19th century utilitarianism to produce “art for art’s sake.”
[71] An inventor of modernist autobiography who inspired Ernest Hemingway to rank him among the world’s best memoirists.
[72] A friend and translator of French symbolist and naturalist writers who catalyzed aestheticism and decadence in the 1890s.
[73] A literary pathfinder who challenged and inspired younger writers like James Joyce, who imitated and translated Moore’s fiction.
[74] A property owner whose ancestral home in Ireland was burned by terrorists as punishment for his family’s politics.
[75] A promoter of old and new music who wrote two apex novels about a prima donna who leaves the grand opera for religion.
[76] An Irish Literary Revivalist who collaborated with William Butler Yeats and others to kick-start a cultural renaissance.
[77] A confirmed bachelor who never proposed marriage or wanted children, yet who probably fathered the trailblazing Nancy Cunard.
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[78] As examples like these may suggest, there is much to talk about with George!
The payoff for crossing the chasm is having the conversations you really want to have.
The payoff is exploring legacies that influence how we sense and respond to our world today, even when we’re not aware that it’s happening.
[79] On the other hand, because of how we’re going to cross the chasm in George Moore Interactive, the ultimate payoffs of the technology are pleasure, excitement and fun.
The Difference
[80] I promised a nice payoff to anyone who transitions from enjoyment of popular culture to appreciation of literature and fine art of the past.
Hopefully that’s not a piecrust promise!
By “anyone” I mean just that. This technology is for humans of every stripe and for wizards too!
[81] Before finishing today. I’ll take a quick detour to share my perspective on e- versus i- in the digital age.
Most of us use these adjectives interchangeably, but to me their meaning is different.
[82] E hyphen [anything] was a siren song in the late 20th century. When I first heard it in rural Georgia, members of my faculty tied me to a mast though I soon wriggled free.
[83] I had no training in technology but I got behind e-learning with a passion. First I saw it as a reinforcement of tutorials and lectures. Then I believed it was their replacement.
[84] For me andmany naive early adopters, e- simply meant digital content. Now more than 30 years later, that hasn’t really changed much.
Traditional content spoken at a lectern and written on a board gets digitized and voilà, eureka!
Digital technology provided new ways to turn a page, but there were still the same old pages to turn.
[85] Contrast this with the i-. Thanks to Apple, i hyphen [anything] doesn’t refer to content. It refers to behavior; in other words, to doing things.
[86] Steve Jobs said his i- implied the action verbs to instruct, to inform, to inspire. i- also implies to interact.
George Moore Interactive is not mainly about presenting content, so it’s not an e-. It’s meant to facilitate behavior.
How? By enabling folks to explore a literary legacy and discover things that matter to them.
[87] In that sense, George Moore Interactive is an engine that supersedes digital publishing. It creates spontaneous experience.
Old-school e-content didn’t do that. It was merely a different way of turning pages.
[88] When we swap page-turning for dynamic, immersive experience, the potential impact on readers and viewers is phenomenal.
We see the phenomena when people participate in simulations, or play video games, or chat with emerging AI applications.
[89] That’s because experience not only desires, but also requires user engagement. Without the agency of complex human behavior, i- media does nothing. It sits there like a brick with no next page to turn!
We know from blogging on social networks, engagement is not driven by content, as it is in lectures and books and television programs.
[90] Engagement with i- media is driven by control. The exercise of control is what makes i-anything responsive to users.
Control drives the irresistible pull of digital media even when the quality of content is poor.
Experience, engagement and control are basic drivers of 21st century i-commerce, i-learning and i-anything that gets results.
[91] Noting this difference between passive e- and active i- is vital for those who make meaning in the digital age.
And here’s how this relates to kick-starting literary legacies.
[92] When I digitized the texts of George Moore, I got PDFs of text that was printed on paper decades ago. In those PDFs, content remains king.
[93] When I converted PDFs into Google Docs, I obtained text that is easier to view and edit, format, comment and search. Yet content is still king.
[94] When I break Google Docs into objects in a database, the causal connections among their data come to life.
Connections between objects are embedded in the text and turn text into my active and even pro active partner.
[95] Here’s an example. If I ask the interactive George Moore why and how he (of all people!) wrote a biography of the lord Jesus Christ, he will not be reticent.
[96] He will respond with facts about his historical fiction: its origins, and techniques, and sources, and parallels, and also with facts about what he wrote and what he said about his writing to friends and family and peers and critics.
All of those facts and shades of meaning have been extant for over a century. They have also been inaccessible to all but a few scholarly ferrets.
In the digital age, data responds to open-ended questions. Readers needn’t rely on scholarly ferrets to answer questions or tell them what questions to ask.
Readers can instead experience a literary legacy as a living thing and be guided by facts they discover.
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[97] I’ll add that the data comprising a literary legacy is not limited to text. It also contains images and sounds. The database is large and complex.
And let’s be honest, many people wanting to cross the chasm won’t have the skills or patience to operate a large and complex database.
[98] They’ll need a “behavioral” interface that is easy and natural, just like i-Phone users needed Siri. And that’s where artificial intelligence and simulation come into this project.
AI uses data to make machines act and sound smart when humans talk to them.
The AI that I alluded to at the start of this lecture not only knows all that can now be known about George Moore, it also knows a lot about each person who converses with it.
That’s partly because each of us will tell the app about him or herself. And partly because the app learns about each of us from our online activity.
This rapport generates another i- trait: profoundly “immersive” experience. The experience of i-Moore, or i-Hemingway, or i-Wright, or i-anybody whose legacy has been kick-started in the digital age.
[99] I’ll end this detour with a quote from a recent National Geographic. The magazine’s cover story is about the application of technology to origami. It says:
“[Tomok] Fuse is famous for her advances in modular origami, which uses interlocking units to create models with greater flexibility and potential complexity. But she thinks of her work as less about creation than about discovering something that’s already there, “like a treasure hunter,” she says. She describes her process as if she’s watching from afar, following wherever the paper leads her. “Suddenly, beautiful patterns come out.”
That is precisely the experience promised by the interlocking pillars of George Moore Interactive.
The Wrap
[100] I want to thank our hosts again for making this lecture possible and thank my listeners and readers for their kind attention.
I tried to explain the how and why of George Moore Interactive. Nobody asked for this project and I’m aware that nobody may care.
[101] Still, I agree with Steve Jobs when he said that people don’t always know what they want until somebody makes it for them.
I’m doing the making now and folks like you will decide.
[102] The seven pillars of George Moore Interactive are Iconography, Aesthetics, Letters, Bibliography, Chronology, Collections, and Worlds. The pillars help to kick-start a literary legacy.
[103] Thanks to a generally accepted principle of the digital age, that “Information wants to be free,” the pillars cost almost nothing to build, for now at least. I earn nothing for building them.
The pillars will roll out in stages over the next few years, at first in familiar forms like an “edition” of collected letters; eventually in the dynamic form I envisioned when I began today.
What will it cost for people to use George Moore Interactive? Nothing. The price of admission will be free.
[104] You can follow my progress by subscribing to the blog. If this sort of work intrigues you, there is plenty of room on the workbench for folks who want to make things with me.
Thank you.
