Category Archives: Hypertext

Hypertext and Space

Here’s an issue. In trying to understand a perceived weakness in a sectional story arc in Sandoval, as he’s working the hypertext to generate story and illustration of certain pet ideas of his, I keep wondering when certain dramatic issues should declair themselves. The answer should come from the creative drive of the writing, but often I have to break out of Sandoval and think “out” of him.

In some ways it’s a spatial question. 5 or 10 text spaces: is that the arc span? Sandoval dealt with the night lab issue by thinking about “what happened” and somehow a relationship between two other characters came from it in the illusion of creative performance, a relation that only became known because this and that actually happened in the story. (But I could be speaking still as Sandoval, or as Ejay Mariposa).

Space and pulse (time and rhythm) are thus concurrences. In other words, 10 text spaces could form the width of a poem in hypertext or the width of a necessary event in a character’s life.

British Literature and Links

We’ve headed into the Victorian Period in BL. We’ll be dealing with Mill and E.Browning. Links are key here. One of the fun things about teaching this side of literature study is identifying and talking about linked notions, things that appear to be constant among a set of writings and watching how ideas develop in other voices, in other times, and belong to neither. The cognitive elements have to do with identification, drawing relationships, differentiating voices, and evaluating styles.

We know that, simply speaking, certain writers (and cultures) display a bias in their conception of non-trivial direction: up is good, for example. Where is heaven? And where does Contemplation travel? The treatment of the concept of well-being, this platonic reconcepting of movement toward the good, of experience, being, and person hood–Mill’s idea of finding the “whole person” through a certain kind of action, freedom of thought, variety, and originality–has a lot to do with Blake’s devil speak in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Wollstonecraft’s arguments for progressive education and against nurtured restrictions. How much does this have to do with “literature” versus “thinking” about cool ideas versus literature as cool in and of itself? What do we do with Mill’s arguments against Calvinism? What does it matter that certain ideas form threads through the years to be embodied in the literary voice and in the objects we experience, such as toasters, Global Positioning Systems, squirrel traps, and book shelves?

As W.H. Auden wrote:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

This “stupor” is a special thing. So is the “affirming flame.” Mill writes:

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery — by automatons in human form — it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

This series of Mill elements–the perfectability of people, the implications of a “good path” and human “tendency” for action which can be traced back to Barbauld’s “Contemplation,” who finds her way to Saturn and wonders at the unknown beyond it, the scorn for imitation and custom (later to be seen in Ms. Warren), the trouble with the figure of man as machine–is also “our” series, isn’t it? Filaments that form a pattern. Red pill or blue pill?

Hypertext and Time

The context is time for Sandoval in The Life. And environment. In session today, which was hard to get out of, Sandoval was trying to fix a POV problem, a POV problem that had to do with verbs.

I’m still trying to fix a pulse problem with the plot of the novel in a certain area and a lot of the fix as it’s developing has to do with Sandoval referring to links, as if he’s going to time the pace of the action against various references to hypertextuality itself–these are time references, since each text space in the hypertext could very easily connect to out-of-sequence instances which could vary or play with the theme of time. Hypothetically, I could drum up a scene:

Let’s say we have a first person POV and he’s describing how as a boy he leaves one house and ventures through the woods to another house to play with midnight labs (this sentence is a revision). When did this happen? “One time I . . .” Or “A few weeks into winter I . . .” Rather than think of this as a flashback, the POV treats it as a necessary step toward a culmination, and since the link has yet to be woven into context, “flashback” is premature. One reading of the novel would be flashback, while another reading of the novel would resort the event as an outcome of cause and effect. (The fact that he’s at the kennel at the moment and I don’t know what happens there is POV at its most bothersome–although, now that I think of it, only moments ago rewriting sentence 1 of this paragraph, a solution has presented itself: midnight labs.)

New Years

And so the illusion of a new year presses on with a kind of weird madness, as usual. The year as we have it is a cycle: January meets January as the sun and earth play their natural parts. Can there be a new January? Do you want to remember last year’s January? There’s this from last year’s Jan 2 2005 post

Well it’s now 2005 and counting. Not much to say about the new year, except to wish those stricken by tsunami well in the recovery, survival, and rebuild. What horrors on the beaches.

Susan at Spinning is writing about narrative as she gears up for fiction writing. I’d suggest not to worry about short or long story, but rather about story and how it manifests. In fiction we’ll be dealing with shorter forms to start because we can manage a lot of them in a semester. Each story will demand what it demands. But I winder if as she writes them she sees the whole circle? Do I when I compose a story? Sure, a vague sense of what the story might look like at resolution.

What about the novel Suttree and Edson’s short Dinner Time as examples of story? One is long, the other short. Different shapes, but story nonetheless. But how they both drill into memory.

John Timmons announces the IF course for the Summer, too. Teaching at Tunxis is itself a lesson in timewarp.

Now it’s 2006 and counting and I’m half-way through Krauss’ Hiding in the Mirror and rewriting a section of Sandoval, extending a path where the link structure now just seems odd in the novel, such that I ask: “Why did I join these text spaces in the first place?” Better: “What was the thinking here?”

Narrative and Science

I’m reading yet another history of twentieth century science and will be moving on to Krauss in the next phase. While there’s a little more on real collaboration, such as that between Einstein and the mathematician Marcel Grossman, and clearer linkages between Einstein and later developments in physics and detector technology, the narrative seems common. We begin with relativity, move through background radiation, and end with string theory, which over the past couple of years I’ve come to find a little tiresome. General audience writing about string theory tends to be repetative, regardless of its merits or competition as a unifier for gravity and quantum theory: quantum gravity.

I’m interested in the collaborative element to all this and how hard people work in the pursuit of verification. It’s intriguing that lots of people, Kip Thorne, for example, took a Sagan quandary and went to work on it, and it promoted more interesting questions about blackholes, which relied on questions asked, at another point in the hypertext, by Hawking.

So, what comes next? I’m not interested in time travel or what will happen if we’re struck by an asteroid or even in other life in the universe. It has to do with pick-ups. Joey picks up a rock and finds a scorpion resting under it. He stands up, feeling that cold zero in the bone of Emily Dickinson fame (even though he’s never read her). He looks up and sees the approaching asteroid cross before the sun, perhaps a minute away from impact. He kneels and carefully fits the stone back into its dimple, as if it had never been disturbed.

Graph Theory and Links

Mark Bernstein in this post asks

I’m assembling a Fagerjordian (link in original) site — a Web site that has lots of topical pages that are linked together, from topic to topic. There’s no Big Scheme and no apparatus — the site is organic and complex, so there’s not a simple site map or table of contents or grand ontology into which everything fits.

We’re adding new pages every day, and I expect this to continue for some time.

Now, if you’re managing a project like this, you want to be sure that every page has links from other pages, so people can find it. One heuristic for management is simply to insist on lots of links: if every page has a bunch of links to different places, then it’s likely that readers will be able to move around freely.

But, how many links is ‘a lot of links’? I think the answer is between 3 and 4, but I’m not certain.

I’m wondering if there’s a comprehensive relevancy standard that applies here rather than a digraph model. Or to put it another way: one answer is to break the digraph with links.

Learning Opportunities

In this post I’d written: “Good teaching is about creating the opportunity for learning to happen.” Christopher responded with this in his comment:

Teaching is about telling the story. Yes, I agree that a teacher creates an opportunity for learning. A large part of that (especially for a history teacher) is telling the story in such a way that the students start to learn without even realizing they are.

If teaching is about providing opportunities then we can deapen the argument. If good teaching creates opportunities for learning, then:

1. All questions that relate to learning should be followed by questions.

In some instances, the lit teacher might provide the definition of metaphor then offer some examples. If a student is asked to demonstrate their understanding of metaphor and returns the same examples earlier provided then the submission doesn’t really demonstrate. The rule is to generate original or independent understanding of the concept.

2. Question number 1 above should not be restricted to the classroom square.

One of the frustrating parts of teaching has to do with the attitudes students bring to the classroom about how learning happens and their role in the process. The classroom is a luxury for most people. It can also be a privilege. Yet for others it’s a priority, because without it they won’t make the goal. Some don’t need it; they will make their way regardless. For me the classroom is a big circle and a continuum. I don’t care why a student is in a class. They will all be responded to with inquiry.

3. There are indeed dumb questions.

When’s paper 1 due? Should we study the poem before we discuss it? Do we have to read the syllabus? Will the journal be evaluated? I’ve seen too many people run with the opportunities they’ve been given to start answering questions now. Here’s to you. You know who you are, and you know who you will be.

This is why a game is a good teacher. Level 2 needs level 1. In a hypertext, 2 links mean 2 paths and the choice will lead to a consequence. Story and consequence. Good one Christopher.

Topology and Abstraction

One of the most difficult elements of learning (and teaching) is abstraction. The real down and dirty knowledge stuff is typically abstract material, whether it be related to numbers or relations. I’ve noticed this in children. Ask five year olds to think back to the year 1976 and typically they wont know what you’re after because they haven’t yet objectified the notion of time, not to mention the idea of relating time to someone else in symbolic terms where time T is related to an already abstracted set of notions such as pi times the square root of string length L divided by gravity as represented by G.

Abstraction then. A map is an abstracted view of a complex set of relations. I’ve noticed that S (my son Sam) is much taken by the old Cole and Degan magic school bus books, where a bus takes children into a hurricane and other assorted tough messes for the sake of hands on learning. These are not easy books to read to children because of the numerous topological elements in the texts. There’s typically a brief narrative element that forms the core adventure story as well as a collection of lists, dialogue bubbles, illustrative graphics, and other sundries.

But what has helped my son to read magic school-bus like books–books with complex layouts and cognitive demands–is his experience fiddling with digital games whose topological elements demand some amount of abstract thinking and spatial analysis. For example, Kya, Dark Lineage provides the player with multiple way of figuring the space of the game: a 3-D environment, a one-dimensional map, and a two-dimensional representation of Kya’s world. In other words, to figure out where you are in the game, you can access the map. Reading the digital space serves to reinforce all kinds of neat skills in children.

Why Hypertextuality Matters

Without cutting to deeply into definitions, let’s stiupulate that hypertextuality is about making connections, linking one thing to another thing. How can be left to the creative problem solver.

Let’s also stipulate that good teaching is at heart a creative act. Good teaching is about creating the opportunity for learning to happen. Lot’s of people can learn how to work with layers in Photoshop. Lots of people can learn how to create a link from one space to another in Storyspace. I submit that how and what to link can’t be taught, but it can be learned. It may be a good thing to provide examples of excellence with Photoshop and Storyspace; but what I can’t do is teach a person what to do with those examples in terms of their own decision making. Provide a poet with Donne’s Valediction Forbidding Mourning and the poet will have experienced an example. But I can’t teach someone to write a poem with similar aesthetic and technical virtuosity. They have to do that themselves. What I can do is provide an environment for a peoson to work through their own decisions. The teacher, whatever teacher, cannot “think for” another person. The boss can’t write the program for the programmer; nor can the boss solve the problem that got things started in the first place. That’s the programmer’s job.

Literature and Notes

Tonight in BL Uno, I spoke to students at the board and routined by taking on a persona who referred to things the teacher said. Teacher said that since the color black follows throughout Astrophel and Stella, then black must have some significance to the sonnet sequence. I wrote lines of poetry on the board and disentangled them with scribbles of notes. The lines go

Louing in trueth, and fayne in verse my loue to show,
That she, deare Shee, might take som pleasure of my paine,
Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pittie winne, and pity grace obtaine,
I sought fit wordes to paint the blackest face of woe;

Here we have “blackest face” and here we have all of sonnet 7

When Nature made her chief worke, Stellas eyes,
In colour blacke why wrapt she beames so bright?
Would she in beamy blacke, like Painter wise,
Frame daintiest lustre, mixt of shades and light?
Or did she else that sober hue deuise,
In obiect best to knitt and strength our sight;
Least, if no vaile these braue gleames did disguise,
They, sunlike, should more dazle then delight?
Or would she her miraculous power show,
That, whereas blacke seems Beauties contrary,
She euen in black doth make all beauties flow?
Both so, and thus, she, minding Loue should be
Plac’d euer there, gaue him this mourning weede
To honour all their deaths who for her bleed.

In this sonnet “black” returns. It’s not a strong link, because the black of Stella’s eyes doesn’t necessarily bleed from the “woe” of sonnet 1. But in terms of reading for literal understanding, the final line of 7 points back to “woefullness” and connects (links) to the deaths we die for love. Sidney is all over the contraries, spelling out love and desire in terms of pain and longing. There’s a darkness to love, a dark power, sweatly luminous and marvelously painful.

The notes on the board and the connections made through paraphrase indicate the importance of notes to study, learning, and organizing ideas, which fly and bonk about like bubbles. Why do the PCers wait for Tinderbox for PC? Because we need powerful tools for visualizing connections and making then accessible and sharable. Notebooks are cool, and embodying by writing in books as a means of response to ideas is cool too. We already know that the flexibility of weblog systems make for excellent ways of organizing whatever needs organizing. They’re wonderful tools for portfolios, if the thinker can conceptualize the space, understand the machine, and keep up the energy.

Note-taking while reading or in a state of reflection (the hypertext at work) is a critical procedure. At the board, while in that odd-ball state of character, I found myself learning before the crowd, learning more about a work that I’ve experienced many times. Sidney isn’t over by a long shot.