Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 324.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (54)
Subject: shades of meaning and personal touches
[2] From: Randall Pierce <rpierce@jsucc.jsu.edu> (12)
Subject: perfect page
[3] From: Arun-Kumar Tripathi <tripathi@statistik.uni- (64)
dortmund.de>
Subject: Special HCI Seminar Tuesday 10/10 - Jan Borchers, TU
Darmstadt
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2000 07:25:47 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: shades of meaning and personal touches
In his fine article, "Criticism as commentary and commentary as criticism
in the age of electronic media" (in Commentaries -- Kommentare, ed. Glenn W
Most, Aporemata 4, Goettingen), the late Don Fowler wrote that, "The
commentary is often figured as a more impersonal and objective form of
scholarship than the monograph or article, despite the distinctly personal
tone of many of the great commentaries, from Maynor to Nisbet and Hubbard.
This is clearly not so: commentaries like any other genre of criticism can
only ever give us one person's view" (p 441). He goes on to illustrate with
his favourite passage, from Norden's 1916 commentary on Aeneid 6.469, illa
solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat, "she [Dido], turned away, held her eyes
fixed on the ground". In his commentary Norden relates an exchange of
letters with his colleague Heinze, "...so trug ich durch diese Annahme, wie
mir Heinze brieflich bemerkte, einen falschen Zug in das Bild hinein..."
Fowler remarks, "Heinze and Norden are the greatest German Latin scholars
of this century: as the First World War approaches, we see them exchanging
letters about whether a woman is in love with her ex-lover when she stares
fixedly at the ground.... The act of commentary here might be taken as
paradigmatic of philology in general, learned footnotes on the undecidable"
(p 442).
I quote one scholar's personal note on another's very personal note to make
the point that the commentary medium in the right hands requires the
subtleties of imaginative language, though in a mode not usually recognised
as such. The commentary may be essentially ad loc., but the skillful
scholar rings the changes intricately on his or her pointers. Though not in
Fowler's, Norden's or Heinze's league, I know from personal experience in
crafting scholarly footnotes that sometimes one has a very fine point to
make and so takes care, for example, with the difference between
"vide"/"see" and "cf./compare". Often, yes, "cf." covers a multitude of
ignorances, serves as a pretentious dumping ground for a list of citations
intended to impress but not inform (as Anthony Grafton says somewhere, I am
told, exaggerating the case). But sometimes "cf." is just right, e.g. to
say "here are instances I think are relevant but don't quite know what to
do with". Consider also broad references to the work of another -- not to
any particular spot but to a whole tendency of mind. Thus, to make up an
example, "In Augustine the typological relationship between Old and New
Testaments...."
Ok, so how do we manage this sort of thing electronically?
One answer is, of course, that we continue to use ordinary language in the
traditional way with as much skill as we can muster but supplement it with
hyperlinks. The thought-experiment of attempting to translate *all*
references and allusions into pointers is, I think, nevertheless a fine
one. The learned editors of the TEI and their collaborators seem to have
thought along these or similar lines in designing a much subtler instrument
than HREF (see, as soon as you finish reading the next sentence, TEI P3
chapter 14, <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/tei-tocs4.html>). Would this not
be properly called modelling allusion? Not that we understand allusion very
well.
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities/
King's College London / Strand / London WC2R 2LS U.K./
+44 (0)20 7848-2784 / <ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
maui gratias agere
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2000 07:26:58 +0100
From: Randall Pierce <rpierce@jsucc.jsu.edu>
Subject: perfect page
I cannot think of any subject in which the precarious nature of the text
is self-evident than information technology. It should be expected that
one's magnus opus, let us say on hyperlinks and hyperinking, will be, if
not surpassed, be made at least obselescent. I think that I can safely
say that the current generation of information technologists are laying
the groundwork for encyclopedists of the near-future. I agree with my
son-in-law, a software engineeer, that information technology will make
the exponential increase of information available in a very short time.
I would like to hope that as well as technologists interested in the
techniques of hypertext expansion, there will emerge those who want to
use the available information to make those cognitive connections so
important to innovation. But I'm excited to be at the beginnings of the
revolution. Randall
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2000 07:31:39 +0100
From: Arun-Kumar Tripathi <tripathi@statistik.uni-dortmund.de>
Subject: Special HCI Seminar Tuesday 10/10 - Jan Borchers, TU
Darmstadt
Dear Humanist scholars,
[This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list
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If you are near to Stanford University..please do visit..An important
academic event in the field of Human-Computer Interaction would be taking
place..at..Stanford University. Highly recommended..-Arun]
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 12:10:27 -0700
From: Terry Winograd <winograd@cs.stanford.edu>
[--]
The Project on People Computers and Design will be sponsoring a special
seminar (in addition to our regular Friday talks) next Tuesday. Everyone
is welcome.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Special HCI Seminar
Tuesday, October 10, 2:15pm Gates 104
Jan Borchers
Universities of Darmstadt and Ulm
Interaction Design for New Media: A Pattern Approach
The plethora of emerging new media technologies, from the World-Wide Web to
immersive virtual realities, to e-books and ubiquitous, invisible
information appliances, requires HCI experts more than ever to work
together with software engineers and users in an interdisciplinary team in
order to create appropriate new interaction designs. A major problem in
these teams is communication.
This talk proposes a new, unified framework that uses "pattern languages",
a concept adopted from architecture, to model experience in the
human-computer interaction, software engineering, and application domain of
interactive software projects. This creates a "lingua franca" for everybody
involved in the design process.
The talk will include a demonstration of some of the interactive exhibits,
such as "Personal Orchestra", "Virtual Vienna", or "WorldBeat", that were
designed by the author using this approach.
For more information about this approach, see the recent DIS 2000 paper, "A
Pattern Approach to Interaction Design", available at
<http://www.tk.uni-linz.ac.at/~jan/publications/>
About the speaker:
Dr. Jan Borchers works as computer science researcher and lecturer in
Human-Computer Interaction for New Media at the Universities of Darmstadt
and Ulm in Germany. He holds a Ph.D. with first-class honors from Darmstadt
University of Technology for his work on a pattern-based approach to
interaction design.
He has designed and lead the development of interactive systems since 1995,
including "Personal Orchestra" which lets users conduct the Vienna
Philharmonic, the "Virtual Vienna" 3-D city tour (both for a large museum
in Vienna), and the award-winning interactive music exhibit, "WorldBeat"
(presented, for example, at CHI'97).
He received his M.Sc. in Computer Science with first-class honors from the
University of Karlsruhe in Germany in 1995, after studying in Karlsruhe and
at Imperial College, University of London, with emphasis on human-computer
interaction, computer graphics, connectionism, and educational theory.
He has authored papers for journals such as IEEE Multimedia, Computers &
Graphics, and the SIGCHI Bulletin, and presented his work at CHI, DIS, IEEE
ICMCS, HCI International, WWW, and other conferences. He participated in
workshops about issues such as wearable computing, electronic books, and
HCI patterns, and co-organized HCI patterns workshops at INTERACT'99 and
CHI'00. His book, A Pattern Approach to Interaction Design, is the first to
deal with HCI patterns in detail, to appear with John Wiley & Sons in 2000.
Jan Borchers is a member of ACM and its special interest group in
computer-human interaction (SIGCHI), and the German Computer Science
Society (GI) and its software ergonomics group. He can be reached at
<jan@informatik.tu-darmstadt.de>; see <http://www.tk.uni-linz.ac.at/~jan/>
for more information.
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