Determined path

The treatment of e-lit as something with “no fixed or absolutely determined path” seems to imply an absence of any path at all, which of course isn’t true: hypertext authors often steer the reader in a particular direction by carefully choosing link placement.

Plus, it’s certainly possible to have one or more series of single-path nodes within an otherwise link-rich text.

Web evangelists

Internet missionaries can be terribly annoying.

Part of the reason—especially to the print dinosaurs among us—is that they're so correct. Broken old media businesses will change or die. Younger audiences will not just read or watch; they must tweet, blog, and update their status, preferably all at once. More broadly, digital networks are reshaping culture, economics, and politics. That's beyond debate. Like most zealots, however, the Web evangelists often seem self-righteous and oblivious to ambiguity.

This trait threatens to limit their appeal even to the already converted.

As I read both Carr and Shirky over the past couple weeks—who both seek parallels between the rise of the internet and digital social media and the invention of the printing press in the 16th century—I couldn’t help thinking about medieval manuscripts.

Since the early 1990s, both medievalists and electronic media theorists have pointed to the hypertexted quality of medieval illuminated manuscripts in making complementary claims: medievalists to continuing cultural relevancy and electronic media theorists in continuity to literary tradition. The medieval books we admire so much today are distinguished by the remarkable visual images, in the body of a text and in the margins, that scholars have frequently compared to hypertexted images on internet “pages.”

The function of these images in illuminated manuscripts has no small bearing on the hypertext analogy. These “miniatures” (so named not because they were small—often they were not—but because they used red ink, or vermillion, the Latin word for which is minium) did not generally function as illustrations of something in the written text, but in reference to something beyond it. The patron of the volume might be shown receiving the completed book or supervising its writing. Or, a scene related to a saint might accompany a biblical text read on that saint’s day in the liturgical calendar without otherwise having anything to do with the scripture passage. Of particular delight to us today, much of the marginalia in illuminated books expressed the opinions and feelings of the illuminator about all manner of things—his demanding wife, the debauched monks in his neighborhood, or his own bacchanalian exploits.

Books of commentary, known as “glosses,” included conversations among different commentators across time that surrounded a central text, such as a Bible passage. The wisdom of the rabbis or Christian sages would be preserved through decades and centuries, with new commentators sometimes being added as successive copies were produced. Over time, the original contexts for these comments were forgotten and their relevance to the central text became obscure, so they became part of the interpretive project of reading a book. Often, the commentary became more significant than the central text itself.

see drescher

Work of Art

Heidegger's way of thinking has left a rich legacy for post-modern philosophers, particularly for Jacques Derrida who has greatly influenced philosophy and literature in the modern times.

Derrida, like his mentor Heidegger, understands that in the Western philosophy, the meaning of being has been determined by metaphysics of presence. However, unlike Heidegger, Derrida does not begin his philosophical career with a question on being. Nor does he take up philosophical positions -- traditional or otherwise.

The purpose of the present study is the critical evaluation of Derrida's claim that he deconstructed one of Heidegger's most important essays -- "The Origin of the Work of Art" -- by which he tries to overcome the metaphysics of presence.

The book presents an in-depth analysis of Heidegger's question of the meaning of being, and Derrida's critique of western logocentrism and his philosophy of deconstruction. It delves into the origin of the truth of the work of art -- studying the essence of thing, equipment and work of art, as philosophised by Heidegger. It discusses truth as the strife, taking orginary strife as the essence of the meaning of being. It also includes Derrida's criticism of the restitution of the truth of the work of art, and an evaluation of the differential structure of the truth of the painting -- as a work of art. A comparative study of the philosophies of Heidegger and Derrida has been given under 'non-originary origin of truth' and 'difference as the origin'.

References have been given at the end of each chapter to facilitate easy understanding of the concepts discussed in the text. Besides, there is a comprehensive bibliography giving primary as well as secondary sources from which the book has drawn. The book shall be highly useful to the students and teachers of Philosophy, Theology, Metaphysics and the researchers in these fields.

Difference at the Origin : Derrida's Critique of Heidegger's Philosophy of the Work of Art
Paul Manithottil, Atlantic Pub, 2008

Things understood by computers

What is the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.

• The Beatles was a popular band from Liverpool.
• John Lennon was a member of the Beatles.
• "Hey Jude" was recorded by the Beatles.

Sentences like the ones above can be understood by people. But how can they be understood by computers?

Statements are built with syntax rules. The syntax of a language defines the rules for building the language statements. But how can syntax become semantic?

This is what the Semantic Web is all about. Describing things in a way that computers applications can understand it.

The Semantic Web is not about links between web pages.

The Semantic Web describes the relationships between things (like A is a part of B and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price)

"If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database"

Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

Double reading

According to Simon Critchley, the principle of alterity within a deconstructive praxis can be found in the strategy of 'double reading'.

'If the first moment of reading is the rigorous, scholarly reconstruction of the dominant interpretation of a text, its intended meaning (vouloir-dire) in the guise of a commentary, then the second moment of reading, in virtue of which deconstruction obeys a double necessity, is the destabilization of the stability of the dominant interpretation' (Critchley, p.26). The second moment contradicts the text with itself, opening its intended meaning to an alterity that goes against what a text was purported to say or mean. (An example of a double reading in music can be found in Gerd Zacher's Kunst einer Fuge [Art of a Fugue].) Derrida often articulates this double reading around what is called undecidables.

Critchley claims that 'it is precisely in the suspension of choice or decision between two alternatives, a suspension provoked in and through an act of reading, that the ethical dimension of deconstruction is opened and maintained' (Critchley, p.88).

Deconstruction is characterized by the impetus to clear the way for an experience of the other. An affirmative strategy. An affirmative strategy of transformation. Of transforming and transgressing Western thought. To get ready for the coming of the other.

See Cobussen who wrote this text.

Think in multiplicity

Derrida emphasizes the affirmative character of deconstruction, the ethics of deconstruction.


Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness (a sort of gratuitous chess game), but an openness towards the other ... an otherness that has been dissimulated or appropriated by the logocentric tradition ... The very activity of thinking, which lies at the basis of epistemological, ontological, and veridical comprehension, is the reduction of plurality to unity and alterity to sameness ... To think philosophically is to comprehend, to include, to seize, to grasp and master the other, thereby reducing its alterity.

Deconstruction may therefore be understood as the desire to keep open a dimension of alterity which can neither be reduced, comprehended, nor, strictly speaking, even thought by philosophy' (Kearney, p.123-4, my italics). The crucial 'methodological' point is that it is possible to discern the operations of different ways of meaning simultaneously. To think in multiplicity. Derrida's argument is that the unconditional arises as the interruption, or non-closure, of any determinate context.

See Cobussen