Bret, I think this is beautiful, and it’s relatively straightforward to imagine it handling recursion.

The gradual disclosure and recoil, and shift of emphasis, is very satisfying and delightful as Robert says.

Although smoothly coaxing the quote open is cool, I think the horizontal scroll gesture does more harm than good. It feels directionally mismatched and opaque. It doesn’t feel anything like horizontal scrolling, and who would ever know to do that, and if they did, when it was available? My suggestion is to trade some of the fun of the horizontal scroll for the clarity of a discrete mode transition, which is what is actually happening, plus a visual indicator. I expect that clicking in the grey area will snap the page back to its original state, and I would also expect the converse: hit a concise indicator icon—something that looks like "(…)” perhaps—near the quote to go into scrollable quote mode.

> On Dec 4, 2014, at 1:46 AM, Robert M Ochshorn wrote:
>
> [0] (DC)
> The ease of the “I’d like to see a bit more of this” gesture in this
> prototype is delightful.
>
> [1] (RMO)
> It's indeed delightful, that's the right word for the gesture, but
> perhaps most enchanting[2] to me was the slithering back into place of
> the "OK I've seen enough" retraction[3].
>
> [2] (OED)
> (A)
> enchanting, ppl. a.
> 1. That enchants or lays under a spell.
> 1555: Eden Decades W. Ind. (Arb.) 53 “Stoppe thyne eares from..the
> inchauntynge mermaydes.”
> 1590: Greene Fr. Bacon (1861) 172 “The enchanting forces of the
> devil.”
>
> (B)
> enchanting, ppl. a.
> 2. Charming, delightful, enrapturing.
> 1606: Shakes. Ant. & Cl. i. ii. 132, “I must from this enchanting
> Queene breake off.”
> 1872: Morley Voltaire (1886) 120 “No spectrum analysis can decompose
> for us that enchanting ray.”[5]
>
> [3] (WP)
> (A) The history of cognitive load theory can be traced to the
> beginning of Cognitive Science in the 1950s and the work of
> G.A. Miller. In his classic paper, Miller was perhaps the first to
> suggest our working memory capacity has inherent limits. His
> experimental results suggested that humans are generally able to hold
> only seven plus or minus two units of information in short-term
> memory. And in the early 1970s Simon and Chase were the first to
> use the term "chunk" to describe how people might organize information
> in short-term memory. This chunking of memory components has also been
> described as schema construction.
>
> (B) In the late 1980s John Sweller developed cognitive load theory (CLT)
> while studying problem solving. Studying learners as they solved
> problems, he and his associates found that learners often use a
> problem solving strategy called means-ends analysis. He suggests
> problem solving by means-ends analysis requires a relatively large
> amount of cognitive processing capacity, which may not be devoted to
> schema construction. Sweller suggests that instructional designers
> should prevent this unnecessary cognitive load by designing
> instructional materials which do not involve problem solving. Examples
> of alternative instructional materials include what are known as
> worked-examples and goal-free problems.
>
> [4] (DC)
> My first thought after perusing this a bit: what happens when you are
> reading a quote which itself quotes something?[7]
>
> [5] (RMO)
> Imagine "Peek Quotes"[6] applied to all of the OED etymology excerpts?
>
> [6] (RMO)
> Alan's "Power of Context" would be another good name for this tool,
> or else for some sort of research umbrella covering many related
> efforts at source/tool/process-transparency.
>
> [7] (RMO)
> I had a similar desire to burrow deeper and deeper and also laterally
> (to other "peek quotes" compilations transducing[8] different subsets?)
> but I was glad that the recursion wasn't the end goal.
>
> As deeply intertwingled as everything[9] may be, being open to every
> reader's own agendas, interests, and backgrounds is not exactly the
> same thing as substituting "authorship" for a worldmap on the desert
> floor laid out in 1:1 scale. To create an environment, or zone if you
> will (ie. for proximal learning?) is still to design, which is to say
> deliberate over, space.
>
> [8] (ispell)
> let AUTOCORRECT sub {"transducing" -> "transfusing"}
>
> [9] (MEEK QUOTE "Everything," comp. RMO)
> (A - Ted Nelson)
> Everything is deeply intertwingled.
>
> (B - Joseph Jacotot)
> Everything is in everything.
>
> (C - m. qt. comp. K Wodiczko)
> (i. V. Lenin)
> Everything is a priority.
>
>
> Your intertwingled[10] correspondent,
> R.M.O.
>
>
> [10]
> (A) intertwined
> (oed)
> 1. trans. To twine (two or more things) together, or entwine (one
>  thing) with another; to unite by twining; to interlace, intertwist,
>  interweave.
> 1641: Trapp Theologia Theol. 357 “The word..signifieth thoughts so
>  perplexed and inter-twined one within another, that there is no way
>  out almost.”
> 1671: Milton P.R. iv. 405 “Under some concourse of shades, Whose
>  branching arms thick intertwin'd might shield From dews and damps of
>  night his shelter'd head.”
>
> (B) intermingled
> (oed)
> 1. trans. To mingle (two or more things) together, so that each is
>  mixed with the other; also, to introduce and mix (an element) with
>  another or among other things.
> 1555: Eden Decades 143 “Let vs nowe entermyngle certeyne smaule
>  thynges amonge these great matters.”
> 1712: Steele Spect. No. 272 1 “Crowds of forlorn Coquets who
>  intermingle themselves with other Ladies.”
> 1803: W. Taylor in Ann. Rev. I. 419 “A cause of displacing and
>  intermingling the people.”
> 1842: H. Rogers Ess. I. i. 36 “Fuller has intermingled a great deal of
>  gossip and rubbish with his facts.”
>
> [11]
> "disintertwinglement"?