Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 827.
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: "Fotis Jannidis" <fotis.jannidis@lrz.uni- (51)
muenchen.de>
Subject: Re: 14.0822 methodological response: hypertext
[2] From: Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@bowerbird.rmit.edu.au> (20)
Subject: Re: 14.0822 methodological response: hypertext [2]
[3] From: Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@bowerbird.rmit.edu.au> (75)
Subject: Re: 14.0822 methodological response: hypertext
[4] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (76)
Subject: and now for something not completely different
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 07:35:22 +0100
From: "Fotis Jannidis" <fotis.jannidis@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
Subject: Re: 14.0822 methodological response: hypertext
> From: Patrick Durusau <pdurusau@emory.edu>
> Hypertext links are no more than an unremarkable, seamless,
> inconsequential retooling of traditional reference mechanisms. (To
> appropriate some of Willard's language.) Perhaps a little less
> contentiously and more accurately, hypertext links are expressions of
> the same mental processes that are evidenced by traditional reference
> mechanisms, albeit easier to consult than traditional references.
It seems to me you mention the main points of difference but I can't
follow your argument how to evaluate them.
Maybe it is useful to apply the distinction between material text,
that is some marks on paper or some structured bits, and mental
text, that is the text as it is represented in the mind of an author or
a reader. If we use this distinction to look at a hypertext link, it
becomes obvious that the mental text is quite similar to that of a
footnote or a similar reference whose target is readily available, but
the material text is quite different, because the reference
mechanism has to be coded in a way which is not only
understandable to a human but also to a machine.
Another concept can be used to refine this picture: the amount of
work to resolve a link. That this is an important factor becomes
obvious if you don't look at one link but many. Even in the case of
footnotes or endnotes the almost unnoticeable amount of work to
move your eyes to the footnote and back to the main text amounts
after a while to something noticeable. These becomes even more
obvious in the case of links to very different texts. The work to
resolve a conventional reference becomes part of your mental map
(all people working with books are full of stories about the
difficulties to get some of them) and the main consequence is that
you only follow references which look promising enough to
undergo this work. This really changes with hypertext links. The
work to resolve the link is almost null, so only the time to read the
target text remains to be taken into consideration. So it is not only
a little bit easier, but from this difference a new praxis of reading
results.
So you could say that hypertexts and conventional references differ
on the level of the material text and in the way how you read which
leads to very different mental texts.
btw, the picture you draw how Stanley Fish reads a text is quite
different from the one drawn by reader psychology. One of the main
differences could be seen in the fact that - as I understood this - we
store conceptual information or mental maps but only in very rare
cases the wording of a text, but that is exactly what a hypertext
links to: just to the words - a problem known to anybody who has
created an electronic edition: you can't just link to something, you
must explain what kind of link this is (amplification, explanation,
source document proving what you said etc.) Maybe the idea that
hypertexts are working as our minds work is misleading.
Fotis Jannidis
________________________________________
Forum Computerphilologie
http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 07:36:00 +0100
From: Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@bowerbird.rmit.edu.au>
Subject: Re: 14.0822 methodological response: hypertext [2]
At 7:14 +0100 27/4/2001, Humanist Discussion Group wrote:
>Despite all the "now I am awake" rhetoric from the W3C crowd, the fact
>remains that hypertext (even assuming robust implementaitons of
>XLink/XPointer/XPath) is an impoverished expression of the associations
>that a skilled reader forms while reading a text. That is not an
>argument against hypertext, but against the notion that it is
>qualitatively different from traditional reference practices. Neither
>can fully reflect the associations made by a reader.
hi Patrick
as a hypertext scholar i guess i'd argue that this seems to confuse
hypertext and hermeneutics. hypertext is not wanting to (nor desiring) to
reflect, reconstruct or represent the sorts of connections a reader
inevitably and necessarily makes when reading.
cheers
adrian miles
--lecturer in cinema studies and new media rmit university. lecturer in new media university of bergen.
hypertext theory engine http://bowerbird.rmit.edu.au:8080/ video blog: vog http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/ newmedia announcement list http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/lists/newmedia.html
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 07:36:27 +0100 From: Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@bowerbird.rmit.edu.au> Subject: Re: 14.0822 methodological response: hypertext
At 7:14 +0100 27/4/2001, Humanist Discussion Group wrote: >Hypertext links are no more than an unremarkable, seamless, >inconsequential retooling of traditional reference mechanisms. (To >appropriate some of Willard's language.) Perhaps a little less >contentiously and more accurately, hypertext links are expressions of >the same mental processes that are evidenced by traditional reference >mechanisms, albeit easier to consult than traditional references.
no. links are what deleuze and guattari have described elsewhere (_a thousand plateaus_, sorry page references not to hand) as order words. they contain force.
i have written about this at length in 'cinematic paradigms for hypertext', reference below. i have also addressed it in part in a more recent essay published in jodi (reference below).
the best examples i can give are all analogies - the kuleshov effect in cinema and what scott mccloud in _understanding comics_ explores as the role of the gutter (the space between panels in comics).
in both of these the work of what happens 'between' fundamentally alters how we perceive the content of the before and after. the meaning of the before and after can be fundamentally recontextualised simply by placing any part in a different sequence. nothing changes within the frame or panel (and in my claim, the hypertext node) but it becomes a *qualitatively* different thing by virtue of this. just because we don't or can't see this 'in between' doesn't mean that it is in fact something with force.
if these panels/shots/nodes can be so dramatically recontextualised (and for a brilliant description of this in hypertext see Jane Douglas, p. 58, reference below) without altering anything *within* them then how is this possible? What makes it possible? the gutter, edit, link. These express a conjunctive force that creates and forces connection. the fact that the gutter, edit, and link are so thoroughly undertheorised (in virtually all disciplines that might study these the gutter, edit, and link is always treated as already domesticated and 'tame' and only ever thought of as something instrumental rather than something with quality (and power) in itself) i would also take as symptomatic of the force of the link. This force is actively disavowed in much theory in hypertext, and the current fascination with usability is a prime example of this.
sorry for the passion but the link is something i have been exploring theoretically via Bataille, Deleuze and the open, and Deleuze's theories of cinematic editing. As someone who writes what i problematically essentialise as 'hypertextually' i'm also aware of very different processes in writing 'hypertextually' versus my traditional essays. There is an 'excess' to the link which makes it more than merely connective, more than linguistic or semantic.
btw, i'd also strongly recommend a recent essay by shields on this which stresses links as vectors.
references
Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books - or Books without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Kolb, David. "Discourse across Links." Philosophical Perspectives in Computer-Mediated Communication. Ed. Charles Ess. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996. 15-26.
Kolb, David. Socrates in the Labyrinth. Computer software. Eastgate Systems, 1994, Macintosh Software.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
Miles, Adrian. "Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext." Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13.2 July (1999): 217-26. mirrored via http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/essays.html
Miles, Adrian. "Hypertext Syntagmas: Cinematic Narration with Links". Journal of Digital Information. http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v01/i07/Miles/ 2000. Accessed: January 16, 2000.
Tosca, Susana Pajares. "The Lyrical Quality of Links." Hypertext '99. Darmstadt: ACM, 1999. 217-8.
Tosca, Susana Pajares. "A Pragmatics of Links." Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM on Hypertext and Hypermedia. San Antonio (TX): ACM, 2000. 77-84.
regards adrian miles --
lecturer in cinema studies and new media rmit university. lecturer in new media university of bergen.
hypertext theory engine http://bowerbird.rmit.edu.au:8080/ video blog: vog http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/ newmedia announcement list http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/lists/newmedia.html
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 07:50:55 +0100 From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> Subject: and now for something not completely different
Somewhere in his voluminous writings (someone please tell me where) the art historian Ananda K Coomaraswamy speaks with sharp tongue about what he calls the "nothing-more-ist" response to visionary insights, which it construes as unsupportable claims, "nothing more than X", where X is something unremarkable. Being Coomaraswamy, he gives a precise Sanskrit term (and likely any Patristic equivalents also) for this sort of attiitude to bury it as deep as intensely learned anathema can. But all this is really itself no more than a semi-learned flourish of entertainment to take up once again my argument with Patrick Durusau (with whom I also partially agree). In Humanist 14.0822 he responds in the nothing-more-ist fashion to hypertext:
>Hypertext links are no more than an unremarkable, seamless, >inconsequential retooling of traditional reference mechanisms. (To >appropriate some of Willard's language.) Perhaps a little less >contentiously and more accurately, hypertext links are expressions of >the same mental processes that are evidenced by traditional reference >mechanisms, albeit easier to consult than traditional references. ..... >Despite all the "now I am awake" rhetoric from the W3C crowd, the fact >remains that hypertext (even assuming robust implementaitons of >XLink/XPointer/XPath) is an impoverished expression of the associations >that a skilled reader forms while reading a text. That is not an >argument against hypertext, but against the notion that it is >qualitatively different from traditional reference practices. Neither >can fully reflect the associations made by a reader. > >Hypertext technology should be supported/promoted for its enormous >potential for accessibility, research, and collaboration. It has enough >promise in those areas to not need the more questionable "now for >something completely different" claim.
Perhaps I am missing something essential, but it does seem to me on this overcast Sunday morning that one cannot have the matter both ways: hypertext cannot be both "no more than an unremarkable, seamless, inconsequential retooling of traditional reference mechanisms" and "an impoverished expression of the associations that a skilled reader forms while reading a text". We are remarking and will continue to; we feel the bumps right now; and the consequences of that impoverishment are enormous! Which is to say, I certainly agree that *from the perspective of the natural-language devices one has for making references* hypertext of any kind I have experienced or read about or can imagine is indeed a profoundly impoverished metalinguistic set of mechanisms for referentiality. Just as all forms of applied computing, indeed all results of modelling phenomena, are impoverished from the get-go. From a research point of view, bringing such impoverishment into focus is precisely the point of the exercise. Long live such impoverishment: it shows us where the riches are, gets us to look at and try to understand them better. (Yes, from the engineering perspective, which I also treasure, such impoverishment keeps one awake at night and busy through the day.)
I also have trouble with the statement that "hypertext links are expressions of the same mental processes that are evidenced by traditional reference mechanisms". Again, wake me if I am asleep, but if you find me awake tell me please how we know what our mental processes are? Is not any statement about these processes a model of something we cannot know directly -- until that day when we see face to face (or after the revolution, as you prefer)? I don't think that people like Steven Pinker, who in books such as Words and Rules make bold to tell us exactly how the mind works, have been vouchsafed a peek; I think they've simply forgotten that all schemes are tentative constructs.
No, I am not claiming that now our intellectual sun is dawning on a day never before seen. Hypertextual links are in some respects the same, in some respects different in what I can guess are the mental processes involved -- at least the ones I consciously work with when making reference. Indeed the differences are hard to identify when you get down to looking at the matter carefully. (See, for example, the historically informed arguments of Carla Hesse, James O'Donnell, Paul Duguid, Geoffrey Nunberg et al. in *The Future of the Book*, Univ of California Press, 1996.) My interest is in stimulating that nitty-gritty work of careful analysis, against the techno-evangelists, who really should turn to a religion with some future and leave us to get on with the work. In other words, I think (with Frank Tompa and Darrell Raymond, among others) that we need to do very careful artefactual analyses of the referential works we have inherited, from the perspective of computational hypertext, always asking where the differences lie. Also, as Adrian Miles points out, think up new and interesting ideas (a.k.a. theories) of how to look at referentiality.
Yours, WM
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