The Storyspace map view has proven to be enormously useful and durable, letting writers express relationships by clustering as well as by linking. Other spatial hypertext systems -- especially VIKI and VKB (Cathy Marshall, then at Xerox PARC and Frank Shipman, Texas A&M) and ART (Kumiyo Nakakoji, NIST) provided inspiration and encouragement as well. The export template mechanism was sketched in a long discussion at Hypertext '98 with Marc and Jocelyn Nanard (Montpellier) and Daniel Schwabe (PUC, Brazil), and the Nanard's brilliant work on MacWeb demonstrated that Tinderbox agents were in fact viable. Elli Mylonas, David Durand, and Steve DeRose motivated the central role of XML. Mitch Kapor's Agenda was an early inspiration, and James Fallows demonstrated, in essays on Agenda and Zoot, that writers could and would use sophisticated agents.

Mark: The Japanese hypertext scholar Kumiyo Nakakoji talks about amplified representational talkback, which is a general design phenomenon. An architect, an artist, or a writer puts something on paper and then looks at it. You look at it, and then it seems different from what you had in mind, and you either correct what you’ve written, or you see that what you’ve written is right and correct your bad idea. That kind of representational talkback is fundamental to all sorts of all creative processes, from the sciences to the arts.