Manipulating texts

The ease of cutting, copying, and otherwise manipulating texts permits different forms of hypertextual composition, ones in which the researcher's notes and original data exist in experientially closer proximity to the text than ever before.

According to Michael Heim, as electronic textuality frees writing from the constraints of paper-print technology, "vast amounts of information, including further texts, will be accessible immediately below the electronic surface of a piece of writing. . . .

By connecting a small computer to a phone, a profession will be able to read `books' whose footnotes can be expanded into further `books' which in turn open out onto a vast sea of data bases systemizing all of human cognition". The manipulability of the scholarly text, which derives from the ability of computers to search databases with enormous speed, also permits full-text searches, printed and dynamic concordances, and other kinds of processing that allow scholars in the humanities to ask new kinds of questions.

Moreover, as one writes, "The text in progress becomes interconnected and linked with the entire world of information".

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New writing space

The point is what Jay David Bolter called "the late age of print," and the transitional nature of the precipice on which we balance is apparent at the metabole.

Many of the texts to which it offers links are linear print-texts transcribed to HTML for the web-browsing screen. But at least a few others take advantage of the web's inherent multimedia, networking, and hypertext capabilities to subvert traditional notions of print literacy. In short, Metabole has become, in its short history, less an online writing lab that performs electronic experiments in remediation than a sharply struck point about the interrelationships of technology and literacy, simultaneously questioning the ideology of print and creating a writing space in which textual transactions renegotiate literate behavior.

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Zizek on democracy

That’s ideology today. We don’t believe in democracy—nobody.

You make fun of it and so on, but somehow we act as if it works. It’s a very strange situation, because there are—some of us old enough still remember them, old days when the public face of power was dignity, belief. And privately you mocked it, you made fun, and so on, no?

Now we are, I think, approaching a very strange state, where the public face of power is becoming more and more openly indecent, obscene. Look at Sarkozy in France. Look at Berlusconi in Italy, who is systematically undermining, for over five years now, the minimum of dignity of the state power. I mean, you are again and again surprised how is this possible. You know, after those sex scandals, two weeks ago, his lawyer, Berlusconi’s lawyer, made a public official statement, where he said that the claims that Berlusconi is impotent are lies and that Mr. Berlusconi is ready to prove this in court. Now, how? How—what did he mean?

You know, there is a level of obscenity, but this shouldn’t deceive us. We really live in cynical times, not just in this cheap sense they don’t take themselves seriously, but in the sense that—how should I put it?—the ironic self-undermining, making fun of yourself, is in a strange way part of the game. It’s as if the system can function even if it makes fun of itself.

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Speed of human intellect and hypertext

The idea for organizing information, which allowed the user to select and display any stored section of information was first imagined by Vannervar Bush.

The “Memex” couldn’t be built then in 1945. It wasn’t until 1960 that Theodor Nelson, who studied computer programming had an idea of “hypertext”. It was not until 1968 that the prototype for the hypertext was developed by Douglas Englebart. The Augment system he developed was used in organizing the government’s research network, called the ARPAnet. This first internet linked all information as “group memory” with it’s appropriate documents to with government projects. 1975 Andries Van Dam , a computer engineer collaborated with Mr. Scholes, an English professor at Brown University.

By making hypertext available in different windows this Non-linear learning style reinforced new ideas and methodologies. It’s interesting to note that with hypertext linkage readers could now go through books at the speed of human intellect. I’m sure we have all experienced having to look in numerous books for the information needed for a research project.With this new introduction of hypertext, slowly boundaries of specialized careers are being removed. The controversy of text plagiarism soon erupted as Publishing industry protected their profit by forming copyright laws. In regards to claims of owning words, I also agree with keeping text free, it is just the ideas such as an invention that a person should be recognized for in their own right. Hypertext opened many doors to new ideas and inventions that groups of differently trained professions would otherwise not have collaborated with each other. To try and ban these is a constriction of future advances in all fields.

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Labels: Englebart, hypertextuality, linearity, memex Jean-Philippe Pastor

How to write Ebooks ?

Historically speaking about hypertextuality is a bit like the 1910s in film studies; there were attractions, practices and very little understanding of what was actually going on, not to mention lots of money to be made and lost.

As we study hypertext and computer games, we need to have some idea of digital media as well as of rhetoric of textuality as a whole. For that purpose (especially for games as Eskalinen put it) we'll use the theories of Espen Aarseth, Roger Caillois, Warren Motte and David Parlett in particular. They form a filter through which the possibly heuristic findings and borrowings from various neighbouring disciplines and predatory theory formations are viewed, tested, modified and transformed.

While discussing articulation, materiality, functionality, typology and orientation, among other things, we are confronting the bare essentials of the traditional rhetoric and linguistic situation: the manipulation or the configuration of temporal, spatial, causal and functional relations and properties in different registers.

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Jean-Philippe Pastor

Unified body of a e-text

Traditional rules emphasize the utility and intentional coherence of a text.

They direct scriptor's' attention to points of arrival and departure, arguing that they must decide what readers need to know at either end of a hypermedia link in order to make use of what they find there. To determine what users need to know, the author must assume some unified or teleological understanding of the text !

In much the same vein, they contend that hypertext presentations need to preserve contextuality and provide a means by which the user can see the fragment's place in the coherent whole. The complexity and multiplicity of the hypertext, a complex system of documents and exhibits, reduces at some conceptual level to a unified body of information, a training manual or a course text. According to traditional views, while it is true that this hypertextual material could not be presented as effectively in a book, the difference is of degree not of kind.

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Jean-Philippe Pastor

Primacy of time when we e-write

Downplaying space in favour of time .

Bergson is presented by Foucault as being chiefly responsible for a pervasive tendency of contemporary philosophers to downplay space in favour of time.

In 1978, during an interview with Watanabe, he refers to 'a kind of latent Bergsonism which dominated French philosophy' , cautiously qualifying his initial statement with a rather ambiguous remark :

' I say Bergsonism, I'm not saying this was the actual Bergson, far from it. There was a certain privilege of all temporal analyses over space, which was held as something dead and inert.'

In fact, it turns out that what Foucault wishes to oppose is rather something like an existentialist or vulgarly marxist over-valorization of historicity and historical consciousness at the expense of the 'reactionary' categories of spatiality. The reference to 'a Bergsonian valorization of time' does not only function as a philosophical cliché. It may in fact best be explained from an auto-biographical perspective. It is with the academic primacy of Bergsonian time (or Bergsonian primacy of time) that Foucault himself had to struggle in the fifties and sixties, as he tried to foster a new form of investigation invested in the constructions of space - sites, boundaries, thresholds, where power inscribes its marks.

Ironically, however, similarly sweeping accounts of the influence of Bergson on twentieth century French thought lead other commentators to radically divergent claims : Martin Jay, for example, traces back the 'denigration of vision' in French philosophy to the Bergsonian critique of spatialization as a specific mechanism of intellectual and social control, a critique which is supposed to bear its effects everywhere, from Luckàcs (whose concept of reification owes much to 'spatialization') and the Marxist tradition, up to Foucault himself.

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Co-presence between texts

Intertextuality. According to Genette's rather restricted definition intertextuality is "a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts."

This includes, as Eskelinen put it, the practices of quotation, allusion and plagiarism. In principle, it is just a matter of recognition. But in these days just because you read it doesn’t mean it is there and vice versa. The invisible, hidden, and inaccessible parts of the text will deny the reader the comfort of knowing for certain what exactly is there in the text. To make matters more complicated it’s not only the dialectic between visible and invisible parts of the text that counts, but also the relations between what’s visible now and what, if anything, will be visible later. Also the threshold between what’s inside and what’s outside the text is getting blurrier, as it’s so easy to supplement and replace the original text from the outside (as certain famous software agents have already shown).

In some ways, all this may lead to the decreasing importance of intertextuality in dynamically ergodic works, or at least to more drastic ways of foregrounding intertextuality. In any case we’d be better prepared to understand the widely varying degrees of co-presence at work.

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Temporal dynamics in Hypertext

As Eskelinen points out, temporal dynamics may be either dependent on the reader's use of time, or independent of it. Using the categories defined in narratology as our starting point, Eskelinen outlines a list of simple functions that allow a very complex temporal manipulation of narrative digital texts. He also describes a set of authoring tools, Discourse Timer, which is specifically designed to employ these functions :

FROM SPATIALITY TO TEMPORALITY

"So far digital texts have been usually discussed in terms of hypertext, which is usually described as a spatial form of writing. Especially the literary-aesthetic discussion of hypertextuality has focussed on spatial practices.

Furthermore, much effort has been invested in studying the ways text links are employed in literary hypertexts. We take another approach, and emphasise the temporal organization and structuring of texts. So, text links are temporarily pushed to the margin, as we concentrate here on the ways the links and other aspects of digital texts may be pre-programmed.

That is, in addition to following Ted Nelson's lead and conceiving links as choices offered for the reader, we treat links as parts of the authored structure ".

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Three classic hypertexts and a reader

As Markku Eskelinen put it , we could say that the three classic hypertexts, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl all did what they could to make the reader more receptive to the marvels of their labyrinths:

by using hidden and conditional links to highlight and parallel the defences and self-denials of the protagonist in Afternoon, his general unwillingness to know; evoking and concretising the familiar literary tradition of forking paths of Borges, Coover and Pynchon in Victory Garden; and foregrounding Frankensteinian bodily metaphors to ease the postmodernist butchery work of connecting parts and wholes in Patchwork Girl.

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Ebooks: profit to be made ?

Capitalism ready to move on e-books ? That's not sure at all.

If there is a profit to be made from literary texts, then this is what we will see (at a price) :

What seems less likely to occur is the digitisation of the mass of printed texts currently stored in libraries. Considering only the literary field, we now have available a number of the canonical literary texts (especially in French and English) in electronic form, but these are for the most part not annotated, hypertextualised as they are in scholarly printed editions, which makes them less immediately useful for readers. More important, there is a vast amount of other literature and a body of critical material which remains in print form. Little of this will be digitised for the simple reason that there is little profit to be made from the scholarly environments in which it is read.
Digitisation is not cheap.

During a project David S. Miall managed several years ago to digitise a number of texts (from the Romantic period), the average cost of producing a reliable, proof-read electronic edition of a novel was about $4000. Consider the book and journal collections in all the other disciplines that a library holds: only a minute fraction of this material will ever be digitised.(from D.S.Miall)

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Oranges for monkeys

Offerings by Laurel Bastian

Because it’s instinct
to bring a small gift
when you visit
I want to leave oranges for the chimpanzees
in the zoo’s primate house ...

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Navigation is not trivial

As Markku Eskelinen put it, times change.

The word digital, he says, doesn't carry much descriptive weight any more, as almost every aspect of our culture is more or less digital. In such a situation digital theorists are or could be migrating or even sucked back to their old disciplines that are more than willing to have their fair share of "new media". And then the crucial question becomes how to negotiate and renegotiate the relationships between these two literatures (ergodic literature and non-ergodic): in what terms and in whose. It's also a question of autonomy and authority and there's more to it than the inevitable changes in triviality, although [Eskalinen] has to admit that when teaching cybertext theory nowadays in Finland, the hardest part is always to convince students that navigation is non-trivial.

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Enter Hypertextopia-PHONEREADER Library -- Jean-Philippe Pastor

La chaîne d'Arnaud

Lisez vous des livres sur écran ?

OUI, YES, DA, YA, SI ...

Si oui, quel type de publication ?

Oui, Michael joyce, Mark Bernstein ou HyperNietzsche. Sinon tous les livres de la bibliothèque libre http://www.phonereader.eu

WWW is not Internet

Internet and World Wide Web – are they the same thing?

The Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, etc.

In contrast, the Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. The World Wide Web is one of the services accessible via the Internet, along with various others including e-mail, file sharing, online gaming, etc.

However, for all practical purposes and in everyday conversation, they are considered one and the same.

In fact, dictionaries and thesauruses often fail to make any distinction.

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Enter Hypertextopia-PHONEREADER Library -- Jean-Philippe Pastor

I say YES

According to Deleuze, the Nietzschean "affirmation" cannot be opposed to "negation”.

Instead, it should be read as a multiplicity of becoming that exists in the play of its difference. Here, Nietzsche, as the philosopher of multiplicity, influences not only Deleuze, but Derrida and Foucault as well. Yet, along with a philosophy of multiplicity, poststructuralists, as neo-Nietzscheans, inherit the standard accusations that are leveled against Nietzsche:that they are unable to account for agency, responsibility, rationality, human nature, community, and ethical and political values.

In Critical Resistance, these accusations are met head on. Not only can poststructuralism account for these notions, but, it can, also redeploy them as a radical means of critical resistance,which, with a Nietzschean edge, is resistance that is self critical— resistance that resists itself.

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Strange goals

I’ve had three of my own children and spent my life thinking about how to manage with children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling. Our love for children is so unlike other human emotion. I feel so profoundly attached to them, and as other parents completely independently of their particular qualities.

And yet 15 years later I am (more or less) happy to see them becoming independant – I have to be happy to see them autonomous. Actually, we are totally devoted to them when they are kids and yet the most we can expect in return when they grow up is that they regard us with bemused and tolerant affection. We want them to thrive. And yet we have to grant them the autonomy to make mistakes. In no other human relation do we work so hard to accomplish such an ill defined goal, which is precisely to create a being who will have goals that are not like ours. Thanks to Alison Gopnik to help...



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What should i do now ?

What should I do now?

There’s a lot I don’t understand about myself, and it seems it's getting worse with age. Paradoxically, the deeper I got into theory the less interested I became in the details of my inner workings (which is yet the most important...). I’m not sure why. It isn’t because I arrived at any great insight, for sure. I still experience the almost visceral sense of puzzlement over matters of my mind and selfhood that drew me to the field. What happened, I think, was a shift from one preoccupying question, “What is theory?” to another, “What should I do to cope with?”

It left me less inclined to bother about self-understanding and making business than to consider the value of things, metaphysics, moral and aesthetic. How best to live? But here’s a nagging thought: might those two preoccupying questions turn out to be one and the same, like the evening star and the morning star? Thanks to Paul Broks about expressing myself about all that.

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Experience of the non-present

Our present experience of time has to do with something that is not present, or one could say, is present in the form of non-presence – like a ghost or a spectre.

Derrida speaks of “the experience of the non-present”. Phrased in the shakespearian terms used in Spectres of Marx, time is always out of joint. There is no presence that is not involved with the future and the past, the air is always full of ghosts. This of course holds for every point in time. Time is always already out of joint, not present to itself. The concept of “Messianicity” tries to formulate this out-of-joint structure.In his text Marx & Sons, Derrida tries to clarify why this Messianicity is “without” Messianism, and he names two conditions that this conception should exclude. It should exclude (firstly) the memory of a determinate historical revelation, whether Jewish or Jewish-Christian, and (secondly) it should exclude a determinate Messiah-figure.

Thus, the messianic for Derrida names a universal structure of experience, a structure, he says at one point, that functions as a quasi-transcendental ground for all particular Messianisms. Let me read to you a passage from Marx & Sons:“The figures of Messianism would have to be (…) deconstructed as ‘religious’, ideological, or fetischistic formations, whereas Messianicity without Messianism remains, for its part, undeconstructible, like justice. It remains undeconstructible because the movement of any deconstruction presupposes it.

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Challenging theory with Ebooks

What is electronic literature?

Differences exist between today's hypertextual theories, but they all share several important things in common.

They are all works of academic humanists, who see in the development of electronic writing the realization and popularization of phenomena described in literary theory. They also represent the only serious attempts to date to apply ideas developed in academic circles to electronic publishing. However, the rapid evolution of new media since 1992 and 1993 raises a simple but important question: How well do they explain today's world?

More precisely, how does the technological and commercial development of the World Wide Web and ebooks on the market challenge hypertext theory? What do the experiences of electronic publishers reveal about the strengths and weaknesses of the literature and politics? Finally, what are the most promising avenues of future research, and what scholarly tools and theories might be profitably applied in their exploration?

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Ebooks and illustration

We must reinforce our view by constantly referring words to pictures and pictures back to words.

Ebooks must contain illustrations of the subjects we describe, and of course readers are invited to go to the actual scenes themselves; but the theory holds good only for literal representations and requires the denial of subjective elements such as association and an independent faculty of imagination. The crux of aesthetics is the treatment of figurative representation; and here, as we will see, we hold that metaphors further enhance our perception of natural and spiritual powers.

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Ebooks made of intertextuality or hypertextuality ?

Intertextuality, as defined by Michael Riffaterre, "depends on a system of limitations in our freedom of choice, of exclusions, since it is by renouncing incompatible associations within the text that we come to identify in the intertext their compatible counterparts.

"He further states that this intertextuality is the complete opposite of hypertextuality because the former builds a "structured network" of limits that will keep the reader on track (towards the "correct" interpretation), the latter is a "loose web of free association."

This comparison forces me to question Riffaterre's understanding of hypertext. The quote comes from a 1994 article, when hypertext was somewhat different from today's (1997) version, but certainly not an amorphous, unstructured mass of material arbitrarily selected. Two distinct types of information linking in hypertext refute Riffaterre's argument. First, embedded links are placed in a text by the author. They are very rarely random.

A second form, "searches", are dependent on the programming of the search engine (program). Currently, different search engines give different "hits" to the same inquiry, which indicates that someone has decided how the search will be limited because computers can not make such decisions without instructions.Riffaterre ultimately sees the intertext from the Aristotilean perspective of certifiable truth. He even goes so far as to imagine that the "Institutions of Interpretation" have not changed since Aristotle. Perhaps some in academia can maintain that illusion, but those who have grown up as "other" would argue the point. At any rate, he embraces an artificial standard when he states,Intertextuality is made manifest either by syllepsis or by a gap, or by an ungrammaticality. . .

Each of these is immediately perceptible to readers, who need no more, to respond to the text, than the senses nature gave them.

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Electronic media and theory

Until recently, discussion of electronic media among literary scholars has been framed in terms of poststructuralist theory (as in the writings of George Landow, Jay David Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop).

Hypertext, the medium that has received the most attention, has been considered to exemplify the unmargining and intertextuality claimed by Barthes, Kristeva, or Derrida, and to facilitate the reader's emancipation as an author. This early phase of theorizing now seems to be waning as a new generation of theorists rethink the nature of electronic textuality.

Earlier debates about the problems of literary hypertext seems now to be irrelevant. The founding arguments of authors such as George Landow, J. David Bolter, and Michael Joyce have been sometimes superseded. But how textual medium works really ?

We must approach computer literacy as literacy, and not as something completely different, be that text, theatre, cinema, comics or continental philosophy. And this purpose has to think electronic textuality in termes of Rhetorics of hypertext. While it is true that earlier attempts to situate hypertext in relation to poststructuralist text theorists such as Barthes or Derrida may seem misplaced, even naïve, I will suggest that the questions these accounts raised about the status of hypertext have not been superseded so much as abandoned.

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