In the middle of posting this entry, I found out that one of the writers of Marvel’s 1991 Deathlok series, Dwayne McDuffie, was considering purchasing my dissertation. I don’t even know what my royalty rate is. To be honest, I’m a bit freaked out. McDuffie will probably hate what I have to say.

I’m revising the second chapter of my dissertation, Recombinant Media: The Mutation of Subjectivity in a Post-Print Culture, and have been using Eastgate System’s Tinderbox to facilitate my research. The software has a small but extremely dedicated following, and there is a reason for this dedication: the software is amazing. I believe software like Tinderbox (a class of software which includes also Zengobi’sCurio, Devon Technologies’ DevonThink, and Bare Bones Software’s Yojimbo) which are information/content management systems are The Next Big Thing™ in software.1 It will be years before people begin to understand why we need such software and what to do with it. I have been telling my colleagues (George Hartley and Catherine Taylor, in particular) about the features of Tinderbox, a program with an enormously steep and long learning curve. Today, I finally wrapped my head around exporting notes to HTML: here are the results for my article, “Prototype for a Black Cyborg Subject” 2.

Combined with the fact that this material is on my local machine, Tinderbox makes updating my research and making it web-accessible as easy as CMD-Shift-H.

Notes

1 About This Particular Macintosh has an in-depth article about Tinderbox (October 2004) entitled “Deep Tinderbox”.

2 The results (as of this writing) are fairly, uh, unpretty.

Works Cited

McDuffie, Dwayne and Gregory Wright. Deathlok. New York: Marvel Comics, 1991. 1.1-1.5 (July-November 1991).

Wilcox, Johnnie. Recombinant Media: The Mutation of Subjectivity in a Post-Print Culture (Thomas Pynchon, Ralph Ellison, Dwayne McDuffie, Gregory Wright). Diss. University of Virginia, 2005. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2005.