Multimedia

Over the past two decades radical changes in computation—including the development of personal computers and the Internet, the growth of portable networked devices, and the proliferation of online content—have affected both architecture’s form and its dissemination, but scholars still write much as they did with the first word processors. Starting with a blank page (or a representation of one on a computer screen), they jot down notes, type sentences, and perhaps lay out their thoughts with an (occasionally built-in) outliner. Yet since writing, a highly idiosyncratic process, is rarely linear, to collect, evaluate, and rearrange information and formulations requires an adaptable system, a platform that can be adjusted to individual thinking patterns. Frustrated by the limitations of word-processing software, the writer Keith Blount developed the application Scrivener, using as his model the writing process described by the Booker Prize–winning author Hilary Mantel as the “growing of a tale” enabled by...