//
// FORKLORE README
//
//
// FORKED NARRATIVES FOR TELEPHONY SYSTEMS
// http://www.forklore.info/

ABSTRACT

Forklore is a framework for writing forked narratives and playing them
through telephony. It is both an web application providing
collaborative authoring tools, as well as a framework for providing
resources on setting up your own homebrewed telephony IVR system for
distributing Forklore projects. What is a forked narrative? It is
simply a text expanded to include simultaneous options, essentially
outlining a tree of alternate possibilities for any one given point in
the text. However, the functionality of the project has been kept as
generic as possible to expand possible uses of the framework. Forklore
draws its inspiration from Choose Your Own Adventure books and
hybridizes it with models of automation used in the telecommunications
industry.

FRAMEWORK

The Forklore project provides a web application for collaboratively
authoring forked narratives with other users. This application offers
a node-based workflow that streamlines the rapid expansion of
narrative forks by simultaneous writers, an effort that may or may not
be coordinated implicitly. Forklore also serves as an open repository
for projects developed on the framework which can be hosted and
distributed in many ways, with primary development focused on
telephony and DTMF as a means to traverse the texts written by
Forklore users. Forklore also aims to be a resource for information,
methods, and tools for setting up ad-hoc, homebrewed IVR systems using
accessible technologies honed for distributing and serving Forklore
projects. Currently, Forklore also provides functional software,
instructions, and source code for turning a computer into an expanded
Forklore answering machine (a host). The conceptual emphasis is to
document and share various mix-and-match methods for setting up a
host to empower users to host their own IVRs.

Current tools and technologies of interest: telephones, DTMF,
answering machines, OSC, SuperCollider, MAX/MSP, Asterisk, speech
synthesis, VoIP, Skype, voice modems, soldering irons, the interweb,
HAM radio.

EXTENSIONS

Although most of the development is centered around the Forklore
framework, it is a goal of the project to support the expansion and
distribution of the methods, source code, and other resources related
to the project with the hope that it will be useful for other
experiments in alternative telephony systems.

CORE DVRS AND LOCALE.

The Forklore project is currently being developed and actively
maintained by Tamas Kemenczy in Chicago IL. The first experimental
Forklore IVR will be developed and housed in the open-access,
open-source computer lab located at a former flowershop in the Pilsen
neighborhood of Chicago IL. Any interested developers are welcome to
participate in the project. Currently, the Forklore project needs
development on the telecom side of things, especially documenting
various ways of installing an IVR using both hardware and software.

GLOSSARY

Throughout the Forklore website, resources and source code, various
invented, perhaps confusing, terms are used.

Projects. These are the forked narratives individually or
collaborative developed on the Forklore framework.

Forks. These are the nodes comprising a project. They not only define
a narrative point in the project, they also define the simultaneous
options that link to other forks in the project.

Users. A fancy wrapper term for those who engage in writing
multitudes of simultaneous, concurrent or otherwise variant outcomes
of points in narration.

Hosts. Ad-hoc systems that may or may not include hacked
telephones, answering machines, computers (very-likely) that are
assembled into a DIY IVR. These systems communicate with the Forklore
repository to serve projects to callers.

http://www.forklore.info/
http://www.dai5ychain.net/