Boys and girls

During the key ages when kids are in school, boys and girls actually behave very differently," said Paul Kropp. "Our brains are different."

Kropp spent a substantial portion of his speech comparing the gender differences that influence reading material preferences. The entire room read Robert Munsch's Mortimer out loud, a book that would typically appeal to boys. It encouraged aggressive and defiant behaviour in comparison to Franklin's Fib by Paulette Bourgeois and Brenda Clark, which promoted emotional reflection

"I know for myself personally I need to spend more time looking at the non-fiction sections of my library and those types of books that will appeal to boy readers particularly, where there's always a weakness," said Gaetan Hammond, a teacher-librarian with Regina Public Schools.
As an educator and an author, Kropp has tried to fulfill the interests of young people by writing more than 50 novels. Some of them were specifically made for what he calls "reluctant readers." He has also written several award-winning young adult novels and beginner-level books with illustrations.

The idea behind the presentation was to recognize the differences in literature and how to balance them to promote literacy in the the classroom. Following Kropp's speech, the teacher-librarians were sent off to take some classes of their own.

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- PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Stable entities

Any understanding of a process behind the product supposed the course of action to proceed in an orderly definable series of steps or stages that are readily observable.

This approach presupposes that hypertextual writer's behaviour is largely observable, that we all think in more or less the same way when we are in front of a screen, that genres are stable entities, that process has little intrinsic value, and that language is a transparent vehicle capable of transferring precise meaning from writer to reader.

This predominant model, which is still evident to varying degrees in some writing programs today, has come to be known as the current-traditional paradigm.

So what?

Organization of the text

In cybernetics the term cybertext is used to describe the concept of organization of the text in order to analyze the influence of the medium as an integral part of the literary dynamic, as noted by Espen Aarseth in 1997.

The term cybertext is derived from the word cybernetics, which was coined by Norbert Wiener in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), which in turn comes from the Greek word kybernetes -helmsman.

The fundamental idea in the development of the theory of cybernetics is the concept of feedback: a portion of information produced by the system that is taken, total or partially, as input. Cybernetics is the science that studies control and regulation in systems in which there exists flow and feedback of information. Though first used by science fiction poet Bruce Boston (Cybertexts, 1992), the term cybertext was brought to the literary world’s attention by Espen Aarseth in 1997.

Aarseth's concept of cybertext focuses on the organization of the text in order to analyze the influence of the medium as an integral part of the literary dynamic. According to Aarseth, cybertext is not a genre in itself; in order to classify traditions, literary genres and aesthetic value, we should inspect texts at a much more local level.

The concept of cybertext offers a way to expand the reach of literary studies to include phenomena that are perceived today as foreign or marginal (Aarseth, 1997). In Aarseth’s work, cybertext denotes the general set of text machines which, operated by readers, yield different texts for reading.

For example, with a book like Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, each reader will encounter not just poems arranged in a different order, but different poems depending on the precise way in which they turn the sections of page.

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Jay David Bolter and new genres and forms

Roy Christopher: The web has provided an environment for the high-speed spread and exchange of information. Do you think it has evolved in the best possible manner? What could we be doing better on and with the internet’s power?

Jay David Bolter: The World Wide Web is an extraordinary achievement. It isn’t just about the exchange of information, narrowly conceived as bytes of data. It has already spawned a whole set of new media genres and forms: news and information sites, personal home pages, corporate sites for marketing and sales, entertainment sites, gambling and pornography sites, and the sometimes tedious, sometimes amazing webcams. The Web is now suffused with the influence of global capitalism, and for that reason alone it has become an object of critique for many in media studies. The Web has also disappointed the relatively small, but dedicated community of writers who were creating standalone or small networked hypertexts in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many of their systems were more sophisticated than the Web in the sense that they offered better linking protocols and more possibilities for author/reader interaction. Nevertheless, the Web succeeded in capturing the imagination of our culture where these earlier systems did not. We could certainly propose a more powerful global hypertext system, but the genius of the Web lay in its (originally) simple link structure and its distributed architecture. Everyone could understand how the Web worked - how you traveled from page to page - and anyone with access to a server could create her own Web pages. As soon as inline graphics were added in 1993, the Web had everything it needed to become a cultural and economic phenomenon.
The Web is changing, developing richer forms of interaction. But as everyone who uses the Web is aware, the most important trend is toward increasing use of multimedia forms. Tim Berners-Lee originally conceived of the Web principally as a textual medium. The development of the Mosaic browser in 1993 gave us the Web as a new space for graphic design—the combination of text and static graphics. Now we see animation, digitized video, and sound playing a greater role. This trend will surely continue, even if we don’t see the ultimate ‘convergence’ of television and the computer that some have predicted.

With the movement to the Web, the nature of electronic literature changed as well.

Whereas early works tended to be blocks of text (traditionally called lexia) with limited graphics, animation, colors and sound, later works make much fuller use of the multi-modal capabilities of the Web; while the hypertext link is considered the distinguishing feature of the earlier works, later works use a wide variety of navigation schemes and interface metaphors that tend to de-emphasize the link as such. In my keynote speech at the 2002 Electronic Literature Symposium at UCLA, these distinctions led me to call the early works "first-generation" and the later ones "second-generation," with the break coming around 1995. To avoid the implication that first-generation works are somehow superseded by later aesthetics, it may be more appropriate to call the early works "classical," analogous to the periodization of early films. Shelley Jackson's important and impressive Patchwork Girl can stand as an appropriate culminating work for the classical period. The later period might be called contemporary or postmodern (at least until it too appears to reach some kind of culmination and a new phase appears).

By N. Katherine Hayles

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Labels: Aarseth, ergodic, game, Genette, intertextuality

Electronic literature

Electronic literature is "work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer".

A recent overview of the different genres of electronic literature and providing discussions of many specific works is N. Katherine Hayles' Electronic Literature: What Is It?

According to the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), a non-profit organization that promotes the reading and writing of electronic literatures, there are several forms of electronic literature:

• 
  hypertext fiction and hypertext poetry, on and off the Web
  Works of fiction published solely or initially on the Web that require its capabilities
  Kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms; digital poetry, e-poetry
  Computer art installations which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects
  Conversational characters, also known as chatterbots
  Interactive fiction
  Novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs
  Poems and stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at the beginning
  Collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work
  Literary performances online that develop new ways of writing .

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Real-world hypertextual writing

When interpreting a system of signs, the audience will make a judgement about the modality of the whole, i.e. they will decide whether it is more likely to be fact or fiction, real or unreal.

It also refers to how the audience feels about the message's validity and reliability. Images with higher modality appear more real than those with a lesser modality. To make this calibration, the audience will draw on its collective experience and understanding of the real world and of the particular medium of communication being used. Hence, those who enter a cineplex or theatre are aware that the content of the system they are about to view will usually be delivered by actors. But, if an individual randomly switches channel on the television, the new set of signifers must be evaluated: does this appear to be live or recorded, are these people known to be actors or do they have real-world roles that would explain their presence on the television, what does the genre or format of the programme appear to be, etc?

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