Long form textuality

With E-Readers here are the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, new forms of narratives, invention. New modes of storytelling. A rise in importance of texts and meaning. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed

The thing is to understand why we historically haven't read long-form text on screens and how the e-readers are wedging themselves in the middle of everything.

We got to separate good and bad hypertextuality.

The key difference between Formless and Definite Content is the interaction between the content and the page (their fusion actually). Formless Content doesn’t see the page or its boundaries. Whereas Definite Content is not only aware of the page, but embraces it. It edits, shifts and resizes itself to fit the e-page. In a sense, Definite Content approaches the page as a canvas — something with dimensions and limitations — and leverages these attributes to both elevate the object and the content to a more complete whole.

Formless Content is unaware of the container.

Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas. Formless content is usually only PDF. Definite content usually has some hypertextual elements along with text.


- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

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.

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

PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

What is Hypertextual

With computer technology, it's easy to direct readers to related ideas.





This computer-based glossary is hypertextual: I can refer you to terms like Alexandrine and Postmodern, and you can go directly there — and once there, you can follow links elsewhere. Text turns into a web of connections, and the reader chooses which connections to follow.Metabole is a huge collection of hypertext documents, where each page on the solution can refer to any other page of the hypertext.

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