Rewriting History: More Power to Creative People

Abstract

Trying out different alternatives is a natural part of creative work. However, with the current tools we often end up having to redo changes that worked in one alternative on other versions. This is additional work that should be unnecessary in our electronic age. We propose a new approach for supporting creative work: an artifact is described as the history of the operations that created it. We show that by allowing users to change the history, the common use cases of merging, generalizing and specializing can be supported efficiently. The “rewriting history” approach is based on a formal specification of the operations offered by a tool, and enables exciting new ways to share and combine creative work. It is complementary to state-based version control and offers the user a new understanding of merging. It was implemented for a drawing tool that supports synchronous collaborative work.