Lester D. Nelson

An initial thought

I find some amazement in the many way stories influence so much of our lives. From a corporate viewpoint, we might have:

• the elevator story, so that someone without sufficient resources may appeal to those with such
• sales and advertising that help create those resources
• weekly or monthly activity reports, again not unrelated to continued resources
• user stories in ethnographic studies, to help us convey what is happening, not just what people say is happening (yet another story)
• user scenarios in design, so that we may imagine a situation that is to some degree unprecedented, but expressed in terms that make it look like a commonplace future
• and not to mention, the identity construction, reconstruction, deconstruction in websites, blogs, resumes, cover letters, interviews, etc.

I think of technology research and development as a narrative of many overlapping parts.

A thought in motion

Here's a work-in-progress for such a storytelling

A final thought about these pages

It has been fun telling a story of myself. In producing most of these web pages, I chose to use a very old Web production technique: Emacs directly on the HTML, and upload via FTP. I find that WYSIWYG and integrated environments can be tedious if relied on exclusively (point click point click, set property, drag). Other forms of structure, whether implicit, explicit, hidden, or visible, when all called consciously to mind and manipulated by hand, can be a form of meditation, reflection, and relaxation. It also seems to have produced some retro looking pages here. Everything is constraining in its own way.

Cheers,
Les
29 May 2005

You can contact me by emailing lesnelson at acm.org

Home