The Literary Salon A Group Project of Gesture and Narrative Language

Internet cafes have allowed people to come together to a typically social space and then, often, ignore each other, using the networked computers to communicate instead with remote parties. The Literary Salon is a space where the computers are networked locally and people can use the systems to enhance, rather than replace, the social conversation and interchange among those present. In this era of complaints about the negative effects of computers on social interaction and language use, we thought it good to show how the computer can raise the tenor of the conversation.

The Literary Salon consists now of three types of tables which allow participants to send messages to other tables. The tables are Shadowtalk, CrossTalk, and TOCC-Talk. TOCC stands for "Table of Constrained Communication."

• ShadowTalk information from Hannes Vilhjįlmsson's October 1997 presentation. Click on the Shadowtalk image to begin viewing the slides, and click on each slide to continue.
• CrossTalk and TOCC-Talk information from Kimiko Ryokai's October 1997 presentation. Click on the CrossTalk image to begin viewing slides, and click on each slide to continue.
• Notes from the Spring 1997 class which worked on the project.