Visual Meta for the Web

Part of our redesign will be the incorporation of Visual Meta into our pages.

What is Visual Meta you might ask? It is meta-data containing authorship and citation information allowing a page to effectively identify itself to reference managers.

But unlike older systems like COINS or HTML header meta-data tags, Visual Meta is a viable part of a document that a software application or human reader can easily locate and extract. And when printed, it can be scanned in and converted back to data via ORC technology. This makes it remarkably robust and superior to the automatically generated headers footers added by most browsers when a web page is printed.

Visual Meta is an open standard that at minimum contains a self-citation block, but it and can be augmented with additional content like glossary entries, so what we can do with Visual Meta is limited only by our imagination!

The New Media Reader

To chart our future course it is critical that we not loose sight of the best ideas of the past, particularly where they have fallen out of fashion.

The New Media Reader​*​ (ISBN: 978-0-262-23227-2) edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort is a critical volume assembling such classic papers as Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think”, J.C.R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, and Douglas Engelbart and William English’s “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect” along with complete documents and excerpts from countless other seminal works.​1​

These key references will directly inform the architecture of our information technology infrastructure.


  1. ​*​
    This title was also typeset as theNewMediaReader and comes bundled with a CD ROM of videos demonstrating many of the systems discussed.
  1. 1.
    Wardrip-Fruin N. The New Media Reader. MIT Press; 2003.