How is an unbook different?
The unbook process, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.
A couple of people have asked how unbooks differ from wikis. That’s a great question and led to some reflection and a conversation with my friend Alan Smith (Thanks Alan!) which yielded a few insights.
The top line: Unbooks and wikis are similar in some ways but different in others.
Similarities: Both wikis and unbooks:
1) Are subject to constant and continuous change.
2) Involve communities who are interested in developing content or topic areas.
3) Can have multiple authors.
4) Have multiple defined roles within the community, i.e., reader, author, editor, etc.
Differences:
1) A wiki community is centered around online content in the form of hyperlinked web pages, while an unbook community is centered around printed content in the form of a book.
2) The number of pages in a wiki is conceptually unlimited, while the number of pages in an unbook is limited by its presence in the physical world. The limits may vary but my self-imposed limit is around 400 pages. This forces constant winnowing of the content to a finite set.
3) Because of the size limitation, an unbook’s online content has a tendency to greatly exceed the printed content. This forces more rigor into the editorial process for the printed content. The online content supplements and reinforces the ideas in the book, and also forces change in the book over time. The result is that the unbook is a tightly edited, up-to-date summary of what can be found on the web.
4) A wiki does not have a linear narrative while an unbook does: Before a physical book can be printed the order of its pages must be determined.
5) An unbook has natural offshoots (the physical objects) where the content is frozen in time. This allows one to take a historical look at an unbook in a different way than a wiki. In a wiki, you can look at the evolution of individual pages but it’s difficult to have an “entire snapshot” of the wiki at a particular instant in time.
6) A wiki can include motion and video while an unbook can only point to such things — the print media has constraints. These constraints can be valuable and are well-known: The unbook needs no electicity and never goes down. It can be archived for thousands of years. When reading an unbook one is less subject to interruption by IM, email, dings and beeps, etc.
7) I suppose the primary difference is one of intentions and expectations.
An unbook is a narrative object: a developing account that may change significantly over time, like a children’s story that is told and retold with additions and changes by multiple authors. Like a story an unbook has a clear beginning and end, although those things might change over time.
A wiki is a map object: a virtual space that can be searched, explored and navigated in various ways. A wiki, like a physical space, has many starting and ending points. You can enter a wiki many ways and there is no “end” to a wiki.
These are just one person’s thoughts. I hope you will add your thoughts and comments to this interesting thread.
Although I’m just starting to consider the possibilities of an unbook, I am thinking that this is an approach that can have great significance for oral histories, especially regarding events where there’s significant debate and new information becomes declassified or discovered. Intriguing.
Great point. Anything that might be considered an “evolving narrative” would, I think, be perfect for an unbook project.
Thanks for the illuminating post. The consequences of the unbook had remained opaque until focusing hard on what makes it different from the wiki.
A few thoughts –
The introduction of physical objects admits different social interactions relating to the unbook. I.E. I can meet someone for a cup of coffee and loan someone an unbook artifact, and that passing of a physical object has a immediate, direct quality that sharing the url of a wiki does not have. While a wiki can only be a channel where ideas are passed between individuals, the unbook presents itself as not only a channel, but an object as well. As I look for what implications this may have on community, I yield to the complexity of the problem, throwing my hands up in the air saying “I haven’t any clue”, but at the same time I am hopeful such interactions over an unbook highlight the fact that people, flesh and blood, not avatars, bits and pixels, are the constituents of community.
Also I gleefully point out that part of #6 – the constraint that an unbook may contain no motion – may be defied as the techniques of the flipbook may be employed. I suppose this form takes on more of a quality of the play of exquisite corpse
The unbook idea is directly related to user interfaces. All too often we consider interfaces to be unlimited collections of functionality. We do this without regard to the realities of users and cognition. We need to keep cognative limits in mnd when we build interfaces.