History of AboutInterface

Online since 1993, inter\face is one of the oldest electronic literary magazines. After seeing little activity since 1999, inter\face magazine is now making a comeback!

The [WikiTikiTavi?] software that powers this new site is powerful and exciting! The dream of the editor for the past few years has been to decentralize the EditorialProcess??, allowing writers and readers to jointly participate in the submission process and, from there, the process of creating the journal or magazine...

Banner art is by Enrique Lopez.

History

The first issue of inter\face magazine was published in 1992. Word Perfect, a laser printer, and computers in the Humanities computer lab provided the perfect opportunity to collect, publish, and distribute works of the large community of writers at and around SUNY Albany.

inter\face was considered a "forum" for writers to share their works with others. Writers were asked to "contribute" their work rather than "submit" to the power of the publisher. Since the editors Katie Yates, Nancy Dunlop, and Benjamin Henry were writers themselves, editorial decisions were based on a writing workshop model.

At the time, most writers were new to the computer and many feared the inevitable changes. The editors of inter\face saw the technology as a tool to quickly and easily give writers their counterpart: an audience.

With InterFace 3, inter\face "went digital," posted to Usenet newsgroups and emailed to a mailing list, alongside the printed edition until InterFace 5, the last printed edition. The power of virtual publishing expanded the audience and writer base of the magazine, via Usenet and an email distribution list.

InterFace 13 was the last ASCII-only issue. In 1996 a web site was created for inter\face. InterFace 14 was released exclusively in HTML format. The [original site] is still online at [SUNY Albany].

InterFace 15 marked another change for the magazine -- it was be the last issue to be formatted as a monthly "magazine." New contributions inter\face were published as "features," with a different writer / artist / collaborative group seen each week. Eventually a searchable database will be created.

The next goal for inter\face magazine was interactivity -- I wanted to create a dynamic web site that stored all of its content in a database rather than in static HTML files. This vision was realized in 2003, at first using the XOOPS content management system. Now everything has been moved over to a community-editable wiki system which uses the WikiTikiTavi? engine.

Next for inter\face will be creating a page for each writer and each text.