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?

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 Free Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Research results and public access

The more knowledge is freely available, the more participation and innovation occurs and at an accelerated pace too.

Knowledge needs and wants to be free and CERN absolutely recognizes this. If you wish to give concrete expression to these ideas you can always sign the online petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results. In a similar vein, if you live in the UK you might be aware of the campaign run The Guardian newspaper about the scandalous behaviour of government departments charging for information which has already been produced by civil servants funded from the public purse (primarily the Ordnance Survey, Highways Agency and the Hydrographic Office). The paper spawned the “Free our data campaign” which in turned led to a dedicated website.

Apart from the obvious injustice of compelling taxpayers to pay for the same information twice, The Guardian made the entirely sensible observation that this kind of behaviour stifles competition and innovation and cited the case of how Google Earth would have fared under this anachronistic regime. We should not of course be at all surprised by this state of affair in the UK where the same vested interests are controlled by the same clique of humanities graduate mandarins who infest Whitehall with degrees in PPE from Oxbridge and wear their ignorance of and hostility towards science and technology like a badge of pride. The self-same individuals were responsible for the death of the British space industry in the 1950s and 1960s, declaring it to be of no economic use when in fact it was brilliantly innovative and in many respects ahead of the Americans. Anyone who saw the Channel Four documentary on this a few years ago could only be utterly shocked by it.

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 Libray - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Semantic web in Europe

Europe has long been the powerhouse of Semantic Web research, with centres of global excellence such as DERI, Southampton, the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, Karlsruhe, and others; research funding from the bottomless coffers of the European Commission; and an early recognition from European companies such as BT, Vodafone and (my employer) Talis that R&D investment would reap dividends in this area.

Europe has been less good, though, at transferring some of this excellence from the lab to the office, with a rather insular community of researchers tending to talk to one another at events such as the annual European Semantic Web Conference rather than turning to the real markets where their innovations might usefully be scaled and monetised.

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