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.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -
Jean-Philippe Pastor

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.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -Enter Hypertextopia-PHONEREADER Library -- Jean-Philippe Pastor

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 ".

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -Enter Hypertextopia-PHONEREADER Library -- Jean-Philippe Pastor