What the geeks know
- 1. What the Geeks Know: Hypertext and the Problem of Literacy Jianwei Zhang
- 2. Stuart Moulthrop • an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. • a Professor of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore. • a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999.
- 3. Hypertext – Hypertext is text, displayed on a computer, with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. – The most extensive example of hypertext today is the World Wide Web. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Hypertext)
- 4. Hypertext - Nodes +Link - >Network (http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS01/hc/www/)
- 5. Normal Text vs. Hypertext (http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/365/mark/material/notes/Chap1/Chap1.html)
- 6. Catching waves • Three waves in the history of hypertext: 1. concept + first experimental systems 2. personal computers +Internet widely distributed systems +first examination of their implications 3. World Wide Web refinement of existing technologies
- 7. Catching waves • Hypertext as reality, not novelty (3rd wave) – archive:“ a communication environment in which virtually all texts are exposed to automated search, retrieval and hypertext reference” (Dalgaard 2001) – archive refers to any application of hypertext
- 8. Catching waves – Earlier accounts of hypertext: “remediation” (Dalgaard 2001) – since the difference between hypertext and print culture there is the need to re-examine earlier positions – the ‘archive’ and digital media in general have yet to establish legitimacy
- 9. Misreading Reading – The World Wide Web expands all over the world and we live with hypertext in our everyday life – According to an American (NEA) report called “Reading at Risk”: reading of leisure literature is on decline in another half century nobody will pay for fiction and poetry, except textbooks
- 10. Misreading Reading – This report confines reading solely on printed books – reading in context of the electronic archive, like Weblogs, Wikis or even Audiobooks are not incorporated at all in this study – Electronic media is only seen as a threat to conventional print publishing – demonstrates the ignorance towards digital technologies, as well as the problem to see the electronic archive as a possibility for literacy to evolve continuously
- 11. What the Geeks Know – encounters between old and new media are inherently adversarial and never assured of balanced resolution innovation in communication seems to be problematic
- 12. What the Geeks Know – Epistemology (theory of knowledge) of electronic text vs conventional writing – According to Miles “hypertext” belongs not to an economy of scarcity but to a mode of excess”. – The archive doesn’t know sufficiency, only surfeit. – > With uncountable documents instantly available, there is an overload of information on the world wide web – > attention must be elective
- 13. Literacy in Babylon – Moulthrop brings up the connection to Borges and his story “The Lottery in Babylon”, published in 1941. – a fictional society in ancient Babylon which reorganizes its epistemology around a municipal numbers game – perhaps God does not play at dice with the universe, perhaps God is the dice.
- 14. Literacy in Babylon – Moulthrop argues that literacy can no longer be ceded to print culture alone – a new definition of literacy founded on pathwork in the hypertextual archive – to take up the challenge of reinventing literacy for a world increasingly afflicted by ignorance – he concedes that such a change in agenda will not automatically fix the widespread misunderstanding of media – but he is confident that those ideas will tend to exceed initial expectations
- 15. • What is the new literacy we need in digital context? • http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=_XqRR5WJ85k
- 16. Reference • http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/ • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext • http://www.inf.fuberlin.de/lehre/SS01/hc/www/ • http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/365/mark/material/ notes/Chap1/Chap1.html • Nielsen,J., (1995).Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond.
- 17. Thank you