Information Technology Reference
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group met once a week in the evening, for two hours or longer. Meetings usu-
ally had about 15 participants made up of a core group of roughly 12 people
who went to most all meetings and a few people drawn from a pool of about
20 other members. Presenters would usually summarize the text, offer ques-
tions and frame issues, facilitate the discussion, and then close the discussion
with a summary and look ahead to the next week. The schedule and syllabus
were flexible and responsive to the needs of the group and the topics it covered.
Based on the outcome of a session, we could elect to reorder the schedule, add
new texts, or stay with a text for another session. The discussions were lively,
multilevel, challenging, and compassionate. No question was too dumb (since
most of us were novices outside our core fields), no answer too sacrosanct not
to be challenged, questioned, analyzed, and rebuilt by the group. We made it
up as we went along; we taught each other our fields and methods, and in the
process fashioned a new discourse and practice of our own. It was both chal-
lenging and thrilling, and for many of us who participated in NI, it remains a
kind of “golden age” of intellectual inquiry, colloquy, and invention.
In addition to the years of weekly meetings, we also went as a group to
several events that helped strengthen the social and intellectual fabric of NI:
Umberto Eco's talk “On the Quest for a Perfect Language” at Boston Univer-
sity hosted by Marvin Minsky in 1991; the Second International Conference
on Cyberspace in Santa Cruz, CA, at which two of our members presented in
1992; talks at MIT by Evelyn Fox Keller, Camille Paglia, and Henry Jenkins;
and the Tenth International Conference on Technology in Education in Cam-
bridge, MA, at which some of our local and remote members appeared on a
panel together in 1993. We also had some “guest stars” visit NI over the years,
including Samuel Delaney (noted science fiction author and literary critic) and
Tim Oren (software architect of Apple's Guides project).
As we developed a common discourse based on having read, critiqued,
taken apart, and put back together our core texts and theories, we also were able
to offer critique and support for our own NI-influenced work. We read each
other's papers and offered feedback to each other's conference presentation
rehearsals.
After several years of overcoming our disciplinary prejudices and habits,
what did eventually emerge was a new type of interdisciplinary methodology
for Narrative Intelligence. The primary breakthrough occurred in our develop-
ing ways to interleave and cross-pollinate theory (analysis of texts, people, and
computational systems) with practice (creating new forms of computational
media). By having read, discussed, and critiqued each other's core texts, we
were able to develop a common discourse that supported a dialectic between
