Active
From ActiveArchives
What is meant by "active" in "active archives" exactly?
John Miles Foley, a researcher of oral traditions, speaking at a conference on Archives and History, made the following comment during a panel discussion about the topic of datedness:
It would be helpful, [...] to think about media other than the media that prize fixity and unchangability above anything else and that use in fact rule-governed flexibility to negotiate on a cultural and individual basis, language-wise, dialect-wise, idiolect-wise ... how reality is to be construed and constantly [...] reconstrued.
For Foley, the "one-way street" of text is the epitome of fixity, in contrast to the fluidity of the oral. However, in his presentation linking oral tradition (OT) to information technology (IT), he makes the link to the shared and distributed programming practices of open-source software. The text of FLOSS code (and the associated social practices of its production), is for Foley something more akin to the spoken word than to the canonical authored text.
Active, as in code
The term Active Essay[1][2][3] was used by Alan Kay to describe the use of a "computational objects" embedded within a text. Mitchell Resnick created this "active essay" Exploring Emergence, using executable examples using Conway's Game of Life (and variations) to demonstrate the concepts he describes. The reader / user is also able (and is in fact instructed in the text, in the style of a programming tutorial) to make changes to the inputs of the program and thus "test out" and explore ideas beyond those pre-selected by the text.
Scratch is a graphical programming environment for kids, that grew out of Resnick's research program, very much in the tradition of Logo and Smalltalk/Squeak. Significantly, the scratch website provides a "YouTube" or "Flickr" style website to share one's programs. The idea of remixing each other's works is also explicitly promoted as all uploaded programs are available as "source" to be further reworked in the Scratch programming environment.
Processing is a programming environment specifically designed for (graphic) designers, often used to teach and make (interactive) information visualizations. Similar to scratch, the project website serves as a hub and a showcase for work done with the language, and for the exchange of ideas and code.
The web as a programmable environment
The problem with technologies like Flash, Java, and other environments built on top of them (like Scratch and Processing) is that they typically produce more or less sealed boxes on the page, interactive gadgets that are displayed, and often functioning, as figures would on a printed page. Making changes to the actual workings of the code typically requires downloading the source of the program, when available, and editing it in a specialized offline environment, typically a special application designed for that purpose and which needs to be installed separately on the user's computer (when supported) in order to do so. This has several downsides:
- It "slows" the read-write loop, that is between seeing something online, making changes to it, and republishing the work again.
- Writing/Editing/Creating is something done external to the web.
- The published object is something simply placed on a web page rather than situated fully within, or in fact dynamically defining that page.
Technologies like Javascript, in contrast, are run by the browser. This give access to the full richness of the various markups and media elements that define how the web works (HTML, CSS, and increasingly SVG and audio and video). Frameworks, built on top of Javascript, like Prototype and JQuery, literally "bootstrap" the capabilities of web designers, and have spawned thriving communities of plug-in developers. Tools like GreaseMonkey, and other kinds of browser plug-ins, leverage this "late-ness" of execution of the source code to allow scripts that are then "mixed-in" to potentially any of the web pages a viewer visits.
( On the server side, CMSs, blogs, and wikis, have opened the "back end" of the web, creating similarly dynamic coding communites. )
