14.0696 hypertext interrupted, or the meta tag

From: by way of Willard McCarty (willard@lists.village.Virginia.EDU)
Date: Sat Feb 24 2001 - 06:43:58 EST

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 696.
           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: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance) (49)
             Subject: Re: 14.0688 function follows form into argument

       [2] From: "gerda" <gerda@bgumail.bgu.ac.il> (8)
             Subject: Re: 14.0688 function follows form into argument

    --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2001 11:15:54 +0000
             From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
             Subject: Re: 14.0688 function follows form into argument

    Adrian,

    I stand by my statement on the essence of interruption.

    > At 9:30 AM +0000 20/2/2001, Francois Lachance wrote:
    > >The essence of
    > >interruption is not in the medium. It comes comes from the choices
    made by
    > >readers.

    The use of a meta element in the header of an html document to send an
    http refresh or redirect instruction does not per se force a new page to
    appear. Try viewing such a document in a browser such as Lynx which does
    not support automatic refresh. Quite a part from the technology used to
    access the html (you can read html in a text editor), there is the
    question of reading the ephemeral.

    Film and video can be reviewed. A theatrical production poses the same
    problems as the historical event. It is reviewed through a documentary
    record. In phenomenological terms, reviewing a film or video is like
    rereading a document and the historical event in its ephemerality
    corresponds to the aesthetic experience of reading a document, film or
    video. This formulation is indeed open to charges of circularity but only
    if one wants to overcome the impossibility of providing more than a
    provisional space for metadiscourse. Access to the aesthetic experience or
    to the historical event is always mediated. Such access is recreated
    through acts of rereading.

    I stress that even in the case of self-destructing artefacts (files that
    erase themselves upon being accessed), the memory of the experience can be
    transcribed and the transcription can enter into a discursive and
    critical economy.

    >only if we accept and maintain a particular model of writing (and so
    > reading).

    True, the particular model maintains that the best way to learn to read is
    to transcribe (or translate) and that the best way to learn how to write
    is to read (i.e. parse).

    > A time based argument or move is no different to what documentary does *all
    > the time*, that we don't know how to do it, or think to do it, in web based
    > academic writing is just habit. the point of the example is that it is
    > possible to remove this choice from the reader.

    remove some choices from some readers some of the time....

    And this was true even before the rise of the printing press, let alone
    digital technologies. Not all readers possess the same fluency in all
    natural languages. Even the most monological, unilingual verbal artefact
    will be received differently at different times in a multilingual world.
    Even within one linguistic community some readers will be more attuned to
    the graphic element and others sensitive to sonority. Culture counts.

    Adrian, have your or your students done experiements with "voicing" a
    hypertext?

    -- 
    Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
    	http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
    Member of the Evelyn Letters Project
    	http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~dchamber/evelyn/evtoc.htm
    

    --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2001 11:35:40 +0000 From: "gerda" <gerda@bgumail.bgu.ac.il> Subject: Re: 14.0688 function follows form into argument

    Excuse my ignorance, or I must have missed something. But what is a "meta refresh tag?"

    Gerda Professor Gerda Elata-Alster Ben Gurion University of the Negev Beer Sheva, Israel 84105 Tel: 972-7-6416128, Fax: 972-7-6472907 Home: 78 Shemaryahu Levinstreet, Jerusalem 96664 Tel: 972-2-6416855, Fax: 072-2-6416293



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