Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 48.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Mon, 03 Jun 2002 12:14:05 +0100
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Re: 15.471 poetry & the online medium
[The following just surfaced from wherever it had gone. Again, if you do
not see your posting in the subsequent issue of Humanist, please let me
know. --WM]
Willard,
The momentary indeed! Revised URL
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/education/under.htm
> on the Underground, now celebrating its 15th anniversary
> <http://www.poetrysoc.com/education/under.htm> -- thus almost exactly
> contemporary with Humanist.
>
> There's something more -- allow me to take a run at it with a question. Is
> there not a discontinuous, interruptive quality of momentariness that
> poems, especially the brief, non-narrative kind, share with the electronic
> medium? But not only this medium, of course. The genius of Poems on
> the Underground is at least in part its use of "stolen" moments.
and more on Tube Poems by searching the WWWspace of thetube.com
http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-a=sp1001ad5c&sp-q=poem&GO.x=25&GO.y=13
[a search likely to produce different results with the passage of time]
enjoy a bit of Ibadan by John Pepper Clark
http://www.thetube.com/content/metro/02/0205/17/
and perhaps discover how the line breaks are marked up and thus
apparently preserved across changes in scale of rendering :)
<td>Running splash of rust<br>and gold - flung and scattered<br>among
seven hills like broken<br>china in the sun</td>
which one would expect to be rendered as :
Running splash of rust
and gold - flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun
but a browser setting of a certain font size operating on a screen of
a certain dimension and set to respect the value of the width
attributes of the table elements can lead to this:
Running splash
of rust
and gold - flung
and scattered
among seven
hills like broken
china in the sun
Layout likely to be read aloud differently. Couple this phenomenon with
the question of just how accessible is table markup to voice-synthesis
software?
What might it mean to encourage electro-cultural practices that value
favourably scrolling across as much as scrolling down? Screen-as-window
(or view finder) versus screen as bounded-table (sandbox)....
111
101
111
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm
per Interactivity ad Virtuality via Textuality
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Jun 03 2002 - 07:44:03 EDT