Mapping ideas with hypertext

People have different ways of communicating their experiences.

Some express themselves in pictures, others talk about how things sound to them, and others speak about how things feel.

A Mental Map in an hypertext is a powerful way of expressing the thought patterns, pictures and associations that already exist in the brain. "When new information is compatible with your knowledge structures it is accepted, when it does not mesh with your pre-conceived ideas or past experience it receives little consideration, is distorted or ignored".

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Linear modes of thinking

Europe is divided between the pragmatic, empirical, inductive thinking of Anglo-Saxon and North Sea cultures and the rationalist, deductive thinking of the rest of the continent.

Anglo-Saxons are uncomfortable with theories and generalisations and concepts. They prefer to deal with data. Other Europeans are uncomfortable with dealing with data unless it is on the context of an idea or a system. The difference is reflected in the history of European philosophy and in the way our children are taught in schools, in the way football teams are managed and how we structure memos, reports and presentations.

What they have in common is that they are linear modes of thinking. They are based on logical reasoning, categorisation and a belief in cause and effect. Other ways of thinking - intuition, emotional intelligence, lateral thinking, free association and flashes of insight from nowhere – are mistrusted unless they can be logically substantiated.

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Not only associative thinking with hypertext

While hypertext is often claimed to be a tool that especially aids associative thinking, intellectual work involves more than association.

So, questions arise about the usefulness of hypertext tools in the more disciplined aspects of scholarly and argumentative writing. Examining the phases of scholarly writing reveals that different hypertext tools can aid different phases of intellectual work in ways other than associative thinking. Spatial hypertext is relevant at all phases, while page-and-link hypertext is more appropriate to some phases than others.

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Line of argument

Writing and text, as the supplementary representation of speech is supposed to embody the "voice," the deferred presence of the author.

But can it be really ?

The concomitant of "voice," in traditional composition classes, is "point of view." And these, traditionally, are conveyed, or rather, created, by attention to structure: logic, the "line" of argument.

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Three linguistic representations

Allegory is a way of shaping a story so that the characters and the setting are developed so as to have both a literal meaning on the primary level and a secondary meaning on the next level.

Symbolism is the use of the literary symbol, or the use of an object so that the attributes of the object become a substitute for some idea or entity with special significance.

Typology is subtly different from symbolism and is in fact often used as a synonym for symbolism, but it refers more specifically to the representation of things by objects in the sense of representing an entire class or type in one symbolic representation or character.

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Allegory and temporal sequence

According to Paul de Man, the Coleridgean symbol represents the "negative" moment of the romantic dialectic.

The positive moment is allegory, a system of signs in which the relation of a sign to signified is superseded by tile relation of signifier to signifier in a temporal sequence.

"Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference".

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Time and allegory

According to Paul de Man, symbol is a feature of an art which attempts to transcend , avoid, or deny the inescapable fact of temporality in embodied human existence.

Allegory not only does not attempt to avoid temporality, it highlights human finitude.
In symbol, subject and object are a unity: "the symbol is founded on an intimate unity between the image that rises up before the senses and the suprasensory totality that the image suggests."

In allegory, subject and object are irreconcilably different and separate: "in the world of allegory, time is the originary constitutive category . . . . The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can . . . consist only in the repetition . . . of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority."

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What is a chain of events according to Walter Benjamin

Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, Walter Benjamin sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.

He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high.

Blowing from Paradise. That which we call progress, is this storm.

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Some questions about digital texts

What difference does the machine and machinic processing make? What new formal and generic properties can we see within digital texts?

On what basis - computational, formal, institutional, aesthetic, practical, or otherwise - may we group together digital texts into a literary field?

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L'origine du langage

L'origine du langage


Walter Benjamin conçoit le langage comme l'héritage de la faculté de percevoir des ressemblances.

Il serait ainsi l'application principale de la faculté mimétique. Il constituerait en somme le milieu dans lequel les choses se rencontrent, non plus comme originellement dans l'esprit du Grand Poète mais maintenant dans leurs essences, leurs substances les plus fugitives et les subtiles, "dans leurs parfums mêmes" dit Benjamin, et entrent en relation les unes avec les autres (mimesis).

C'est en somme à l'écriture et toute son histoire que le Grand Poète a abandonné dans le temps ses anciens pouvoirs.

Il y a donc comme une sorte de conception "créationniste", onomatopéique de l'origine du langage chez Walter Benjamin, sans que toutefois les ressemblances originelles aient une quelconque ressemblance sensible avec tout ce qui est... C'est là un moment très problématique de la théorie du langage chez Benjamin. Il rapproche ce faisant son approche de la théorie des formes et des essences chez Platon.

Pour autant, Benjamin s'oppose aux théories conventionalistes du langage. Tout comme il n'accepte pas les conceptions idéalistes et même mystiques du langage pour lesquelles les mots et les choses finissent par s'identifier.

Il s'agit avant tout pour lui de retrouver le langage des choses: saisir par une nouvelle écriture et une nouvelle pratique de la lecture les constellations dans lesquelles se révèlent une vérité plus profonde que celle que l'on accorde habituellement à la "connaissance" de la chose. C'est ici tout l'objet de la "critique" au sens que l'auteur de "La tâche du traducteur" donne à ce terme.

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Diffusion du flux

Hypertextopia l'Hypertexte
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Displaced onto the chip

What are the relations between the formal and generic properties of hypertext fiction and the technical features of the medium and its organizational units: the node, the byte, the packet?

What we have seen in the prophecies of the "death" or "end" of the book has been the end of the belief in the book as repository and transmitter of definitive cultural value; that sense of value has in part been displaced onto the chip, the database, the electronic archive, and their framing mechanism, the screen.

Hypertext narratives, though, complicate this sense of displacement, for they indicate the extent to which literature is by no means an antiquated cultural form relegated to the obsolescent spheres of print—it has instead virtually transformed itself and this course will investigate how it has done so.

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Sony et Google Books

Google Books compatible avec le livre électronique de Sony

Le Reader de Sony. Le géant nippon va proposer aux utilisateurs de son livre électronique les ouvrages tombés dans le domaine public qui ont été numérisés par Google afin d'accroître l'offre de son catalogue. /Photo d'archives/REUTERS/Alex Grimm

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Sony va proposer aux utilisateurs de son livre électronique les ouvrages tombés dans le domaine public qui ont été numérisés par Google afin d'accroître l'offre de son catalogue.

Les ouvrages en question sont accessibles via le service Google Books sur le site internet http://www.books.google.com.

Le géant nippon de l'électronique a précisé mercredi que plus d'un demi-million d'ouvrages serait mis gratuitement à la disposition des utilisateurs de son Reader, un appareil portable permettant de lire des livres et des journaux.

Cela va permettre de porter le catalogue des titres disponibles sur l'eBook Store à plus de 600.000, a ajouté Sony.

Le groupe nippon qui propose deux versions du Reader est en concurrence avec Amazon sur le marché du livre électronique. Le Kindle, l'appareil du numéro un mondial du commerce en ligne, offre à ses utilisateurs quelque 245.000 titres de journaux, de magazines et de blogs.

Les utilisateurs du Reader pourront lire directement sur leur appareil les livres numérisés par Google ou les télécharger comme un fichier PDF pour les lire sur un ordinateur.

Alexandria Sage, version française Claude Chendjou
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Linear continuity

Hypertext writing and systems that emphasise 'usability' (where usability seems to assume ease of use as a positive attribute for any hypertext), place an emphasis on the syntagmatic.

This emphasis on the smooth flow of links into nodes describes a highly linear reading experience. Interestingly, in Bernstein's examples most of the patterns that would probably relate to 'usability' are represented by highly linear images, the sieve for instance. However, the emphasis in the syntagmatically oriented hypertext is not, as might be thought, on simple patterns (any variety of pattern could be formed by the reader) but on linear continuity.


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Free of prejudice

Zarathustra has spent ten years alone, meditating in a mountain cave until one day, his heart full of wisdom and love, he decided to leave the cave to teach the rest of humanity about the overman. According to Nietzsche, the overman is someone who is free of prejudice, who is no longer constrained by the morality of human society and who creates their own values and purpose. Zarathustra arrived in a town and announced to the people in the marketplace that the overman must be the meaning of the earth, that mankind is just a bridge between animals and the overman and so must be overcome.

The majority of the townspeople do not understand Zarathustra and are not interested in the overman and, at the end of his first day with the people, Zarathustra is saddened by his inability to move the herd of people towards his ideas. Zarathustra decides that he will not seek to try and convert the multitudes but will instead spread his wisdom by speaking only to those individuals who are interested in separating themselves from the herd.

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Real change

 

Experience presupposes change as well as permanence.

Without disruption of unexpected, there would be merely the passage of events. And a mere passage does not constitute a real change. Passage is pure continuity without interruption (a phenomenon of which humans, with the possible exception of a few mystics, have precious little experience). Change arises with a departure from continuity. 

Change does not, however, involve the total obliteration of continuity — there must be a "persisting non-passing content" against which an emergent event is experienced as a change.

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Factual content

New forms of art

What do you think of the discussion of the use of virtual realities, of new world structures which are made not only of words but also of images and three dimensional objects? People are discussing whether we are creating new forms of art and even a new concept of aesthetics.

David kolb - I think at the moment it is difficult for us to foresee because these new tools open so many possibilities and it is not clear what are the best ways or even what are the many possible ways to use them. I suspect that just as there is no one form of art which is the print form of art: there is poetry, there are novels, there are diaries, many different things.

So too virtual reality will end up spawning different kinds of art which will have quite different aesthetics. I think in some ways the kind which creates the most interesting problems for us is the kind where you would have abrupt juxtapositions of images and spaces. You might imagine for instance a virtual reality room that looks something like the library where we are now, and I go through the door and I am in the Baths of Caracalla, and then I go through another door and I am at my home in America. And this juxtaposition, this abrupt transition, could be used for artistic purposes. The difficulty is to use it in a way which does not become boring.

The problem of boredom comes when the reader or the experiencer senses that: "When I go through the next door, absolutely anything can happen." That is exciting but there is no playing with my expectations. There is no ability then to surprise me because I expected something else, and so your artistic tools become limited oddly by the fact that you have now allowed absolutely anything to happen.

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Virtual reality used as a medium

It sometimes seems that virtual reality is mainly used for fun at the moment. Do you think virtual reality can also be used as a way of communicating?

David Kolb -I think so. It is a bit like writing personal Web pages. Imagine at some future date I have all sorts of computer-related tools, and sufficient bandwidth. I could create a little mini-world, not a textual page, but a sort of mini-world like a room which you could enter, in which there would be symbols and images which I though were me or perhaps were my view on a certain matter. I could send that to you and you could enter it.

And then you could comment on it by altering some things in it or perhaps linking it to other things, creating a second room. So it might be possible to have a mode of communication which was in a sense the creation of small simulated environments, and then a mode of commentary which was the alteration of those environments. Presumably, you’d want to have both the original and the altered version available, as in a hypertext where you can link things, you do not ever have to erase anything. You can substitute something for it but the original remains linked there. You could imagine virtual reality being used as a medium of expression and communication, perhaps not so immediately as a method of argumentation but as a method of presentation.

I think it is important to go beyond thinking of virtual reality as a commercial product which will be simply something you absorb - you go into a Disney virtual reality or a Hardrock Café virtual reality and you are completely dominated by what they want to sell - and think of virtual reality rather as the possibility of having personalised worlds which are not ways of escape but ways of communication.

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What is remediation in hypertextuality?

Bolter argues that digital hypertext is the remediation of the printed book.

Published between the first and second editions of Writing Space, Remediation: Understanding New Media (coauthored by Richard Grusin, MIT Press, 1999) focuses on the relationship between visual digital expressions (such as computer games and the World Wide Web) and earlier media forms (such as film and television). Bolter argues that digital forms both borrow from and seeks to surpass earlier forms, and he gives this process the name “remediation.”

With Blair MacIntyre, Maribeth Gandy, and Petra Schweitzer, bolter is also reexamining Benjamin's concept of aura. He wants to see how aura (or the decay of aura) manifests itself in new media forms, such as augmented and mixed reality. His current paper is entitled: “New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura.”

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How to write ebooks ?

Creative hypertextual writers have to construct texts that interact with the needs and desires of the reader.

Hypertextual writing represents a new stage in the long history of writing, one that has far-reaching implications in the fields of human and artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy, semiotics, and literary theory. Hypertext will carry literacy into a new age -- the age of electronic text that will emerge from the "age of print that is now passing."

According to Bolter, cultural literacy is now becoming almost synonymous with computer literacy.

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Personal homepages for hypertextual thought

In our program we have Web surfing . Do you have some Websites that you could suggest as interesting to visit during Web surfing and can you also tell us something about the Website on which you work with your students and where material of your students is located.

David Kolb - If we’re thinking about hypertext, the two Websites that come to my mind are actually personal homepages. One is the personal homepage of Stuart Moulthrop who teaches at the University of Baltimore and the other is the homepage of Michael Joyce at Vassar College. Both of those are interesting because they connect to essays or texts written by those people, who are both fine theorists and writers, but also because they have many links from those pages to other hypertext-related Websites.

I think those would be good starting points. As to what I’ve done with my students, I’ve created on the Web a little thing called the Bates Hypertext Archive, which is simply a place to put some student works and a bit of my own which seemed to me to be worth putting on the Web. Most of the material there has been transferred from the program Storyspace, which allows you to construct more complex linkage than is easy to do on the Web. As a result, there is some awkwardness in the Web production of the pages, but by and large it is OK. What you’d find there are three or four "fictions" or short stories written by students and also a link to a site of students in a philosophy of art class - quite a large class. I asked the students to go out onto the Web and find sites related to art - paintings, sculpture, architecture - and write reviews of those sites.

So I have several hundred reviews, typically a paragraph or so, written by these students, purely their own opinion, about these various sites, and there is a link to the site with each review. Some of the reviews are very fine, some of them are not. Some of them are quite insightful. But it was an attempt to allow the students to have a voice and to have a fairly simple way of constructing something, because we were able to post the reviews without too much difficulty and it did not require the students themselves to compose a Web page. That is an example of another thing you could do. Given that you’ll probably have some students who know something about Web construction, one of the best ways to involve students is to have a common project - it allows them to learn from one another. Have them create a Website or a portion of a Website that relates to the material of the class or to some project that the students are working on. You could even let them define it to some extent. One of the things that is on the Website, for instance, is something some students did last spring. They had to break into groups of three or four and decide on a Web project and create it. One group did a project on the worst things they could find on the Web. Another one did a guide to college, things the administration doesn’t want you to know, and so forth.

So you are getting people to create. It doesn’t have to be enormous but they learn a tremendous amount and they learn from one another.

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