I have a confession to make.

I'll bring my Tablet PC to most meetings that I attend. But I don't like to take detailed notes about meetings and I can't stand to sit there doing nothing. So I often populate the margins and headers of my notes with sprawling squiggles and arabesques. I just think better if my hand is in constant motion on the screen. If you witness me scrawling furiously, then I'm either taking detailed notes on something important you said, or I'm thinking about what you're saying while I doodle.

That's right, I'm an inveterate doodler.

It's something that I've always done, as long as I can remember. My third grade teacher told me that I would never amount to anything. I tended to look out the window a lot during class. And I liked to doodle on the reams of mind-numbing addition problems that she passed out, instead of completing them. I did the first page and after that I got it, so why waste everyone's time?

I never know what I'm going to scrawl. I just do it and sometimes I like the results. I tend to gravitate to abstract doodles with a knife-edged gestural rhythm, perhaps inspired by the work of Wassily Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock. But modern art pieces tend to have banal titles like "No. 5,"  "Composition VII," or the dreaded "Untitled."

This is where I depart from the masters and bring technology to bear: modern art meets surreal poetry, courtesy of the Tablet PC.

The Tablet PC handwriting recognition engine has a daunting problem to solve and I'm often amazed at how well it works. But if you toss it some random strokes and ask it to recognize them, by golly the Tablet PC will happily go off and hallucinate an answer for you.

For example, here's one of my recent Prize Winning Squiggles:

According to the recognizer, this doodle says "toe: Fatalities: faerie insignia." There was some other gobbledygook there too, but I just took a screen capture of the first few words to use as my title. This sketch has something of the menacing feel of a Mayan stelae to me. But it's only slightly menacing. It could very well be the "faerie insignia" for a long-forgotten elder god of toe fatalities. The ancients must have dropped a lot of boulders on their feet when building pyramids and ziggurats and all that cool stuff, so I can see where there would be a real need for such a deity in the good old days. So this title really works for me. Voila!

Here's another example:

In case you aren't fluent in doodle, according to my Tablet PC this one reads "initiative: 1 appointee." That sounds very business process oriented. I'll be sure to make it my action item for this week.

If you want to play this game at home, the only rule is that the title must be chosen from a contiguous string that appears in the recognized text.

In fact, I'll make a contest of it. Whoever submits the best doodle with a Tablet PC-hallucinated title to the AlpineInker will win a 100% genuine spiffy orange Microsoft polystyrene coffee cup, signed by yours truly. All entries will be judged by an international panel of jurists consisting of myself.

The highly coveted Doodle Cup '08. Who will win it?      

Here's how to name all your masterpieces for the Museum of Modern Doodles, using some of your favorite inking programs:

• I sketched the two pieces above with InkSeine. With InkSeine I can easily translate my handwriting-or doodles- to text by lassoing some strokes, picking the search command, and then taking a snapshot of the resulting query. InkSeine will be available for external release soon. If you are reading this blog post then you know that is February 15, 2008.
• If you use Windows Journal, you can do the same by lassoing some strokes, and then from the Actions menu, choose Convert Handwriting to Text.
• If you're using OneNote, the game is a bit harder to play because it's clever enough to realize that the strokes are probably a drawing. So you'll have to force OneNote to treat it as text. To do this, lasso-select your doodle and then go to the Tools menu. Pick the Treat Selected Ink As command and choose the Handwriting option. Then open the Tools menu again and choose Convert Handwriting to Text. This will replace your doodle with the text equivalent, but you can just copy the text and hit Undo to get your doodle back.

Here's one final example of this art form, where I've gathered a few smaller doodles together to create a triptych. These were sketched over the course of a long workshop so they ended up having similar colors and styles. I originally drew them in Windows Journal, but collected and framed them in InkSeine.

I have to admit that I wasn't quite as pleased with the recognizer-hallucinated names for these ones. "le tent it Emit it", "Itineraries is Eyeleted" and "Inapt Feral" didn't quite capture my intent. Oh well, handwriting technology still has significant room for improvement.

And I doubt it's ever been optimized properly for the avant-garde doodlers among us.

Update: Rob Bushway of GottaBeMobile.com has kindly promoted the Doodle Cup '08 contest for Inveterate Tablet PC Doodlers. I think this is a hoot - I wrote this post for fun and didn't really expect that I'd ever get any submissions. But when some good ones come in, I'll set up a Museum of Modern Doodles page with all of the submissions (modulo spam and inappropriate content [:-)]). The contest will remain open until someone wins.

Rob has also started a doodle contest thread on the GBM Forums where you can post your doodles. The GBM forums are a great resource if you have any tablet or mobile tech questions - people read them and usually respond very quickly!  This thread make it easy for you to participate in the contest if you don't have a convenient place to host your own web content (you can also post a comment on this thread, with a hyperlink to your doodle). All comments on the AlpineInker blog are moderated, so just post once and I'll bless your comments as soon as possible.

I also recently discovered there have been some very famous "Inveterate Doodlers." For example, here is a page of doodles that John F. Kennedy made during a crticial meeting at the height of the Cuban missle crisis! One of his doodle tics was to repeatedly write the same word. Perhaps this crisis was averted solely because JFK wasn't paying attention to the military dudes [:-)]. He was a wise man. In my experience, patience and doing nothing cause most problems to go away on their own.