Category Archives: Hypertext

Process

I don’t know why, but this bit from Dave Winer got the juices going.

Technology is a process, an evolution . . .

I don’t know about the Scoble part of the blog post, but this little sentence has significance beyond the original context.

Why did it get me thinking and about what? Well, poetry and prose storytelling, whose loads come via the deep technology of language of whatever flavor. Poetry “is a process, an evolution . . . ” This is an interesting teaser.

In another direction, people in education often judge technology as a cumbersome accumulation. “Oh, yet another technology I have to learn or add to the plate” and so forth down the road of dismissal or disuse, while the “process” proceeds into profitable areas of research, question, or creative accumulation and application and interesting changes to thinking. On relevant reason to “dismiss” technology is its cost. These are real in the economic ecology of the classroom and physical plants. We need to think differently about the money is spent in the context of research, question, and creative accumulation, and especially change to the institutional thought. Soon, this will be out of my hands somewhat, which is good, and the older pursuits where I can apply what I’ve learned over the last five years with begin to evolve.

My head is playing with enthymeme’s at the moment. If this then that.

Tinderbox and Poetry

tinder1.jpgTinderbox is proving most helpful for organizing my ideas in “futures.” Note that this is a tentative title. The title will come from further link mining, where the writer, through rewriting and rereading, finds more and deeper relations in the text.

Thus far the poem is developing from 1) inferred links and 2) natural narrative logic. Inferred link development is pretty simple. As the poet scans a stanza or line, a word may suggest a connection or another body of lines or stanzas. This is a potential pitfall in that once the poem develops the link may not make sense anymore or may emerge in some other section of the origin space. Natural narrative logic is what a poet senses or feels “should follow” either into another text space or as a continuation of language. It’s kin to syntax or diction. Is it a red dog that caught the ball you see bouncing down the sidewalk or

A blue ball bounces
followed by Mandy
the neighbor’s angry setter
downhill fast
toward traffic . . .

Of course, I’m just naming two thought processes here. Whatever the convention, I’m using Tinderbox adornments to collect pieces of the poem into clusters for visual sorting. It will be interesting to visualize how these adornment clusters may change after common word searching.

It’s now time to start eliminating text by shedding flimsy images and hindersome nothings.

Future Hypertext

hyperprob.png

The above shot illustrates a problem I’ve encountered with the poem I’ve tentatively entitled “Future.” The origin is “I wrote.” The context has to do with “a note” that appears elsewhere in the poem as something that returns and that has more significance to the future than at the time it was written.

The link problem has to do with the destination space, which has less to do with “lexia” as it does with syntax. “I wrote” has too little to do with the relationship between coyotes and “her” and the context of those dictive elements. They’re too important to be linked to a weak, or arbitrary link.

This is a rich creative process (and rich with pitfalls). In poetry, “by the” is an important question. It’s made more significant when link structure is part of the chemical reaction.

Bottom line: “I wrote” . . . “Where the coyotes / follow . . . ” is not the truth; nor is the alternative reading “I wrote” . . . “this” . . . Although this latter issue seems to open up opportunity for resolution.

Auto Commendations

Kudos to Mitchell Subaru for continued good service and for finding warrantee information even without me asking about it and for a car long gone from deserving it. Saved lots of money on head gaskets. Mitchell’s a good company. They sell just a few types of car, each to its own division, and thus can share resources.

But then to the bad news. If you asked me what to do about the auto industry I’d have no answer. I won’t be in the market for a car any time soon (or much of anything else). And supplying billions in money to failing companies makes little sense. GM will simply last a few months longer and then the money will disappear with little worth to contracts. Or am I wrong about that? It sees to me that regardless of reasons or disagreements, everyone will feel the further losses.

Is the phoenix metaphor appropriate? What if everyone stopped purchasing vehicles, new or used? What would the industry request then? What happens to the people who labor in the industry, from the shop floor to the chemistry lab and the screw plant? It’s pretty obvious. I read in the paper about Bank of America layoffs today. The company is shedding, but shedding into what and for what and on whose dime (more obvious)?

What would an auto-less country look like? What would the new potential ceiling be?

Oh well.

Hypertext and the Economy

The economy is in a bad way. People are suffering and there’s lots of fear:

Job losses are accelerating at a terrifying pace, with more than 1.25 million lost in the U.S. in the last three months, according to a U.S. Department of Labor report Friday. Unemployment jumped to 6.7 percent, the highest since 1993. Almost two million jobs have vanished since last December, with daily warnings of dire conditions ahead that could make this the worst recession since World War II. November’s job losses are the most in any month since 1974.

It seems to me that one of the ideas in germination since FDR and the explosion of road building with Eisenhower is the significance of the metaphor of distance. This metaphor saw new illumination in the 80s and 90s with the ecological spread of networks. Social networks now reformulate time and space with simple links. “What’s so ‘n so up to” meant something different when I was a kid. Now I visit a weblog and read.

I once lived in a house with mahogany deck railing. Such a house requires great distances passable by fuel and tarmac to exist. This kind of existential reality was once new and significant. I would imagine that a thinker could trace the change of perception of spatial economy by way of an ecological framework. A new energy infrastructure could provoke another round of change. Solar power, therefore, would imply another kind of railing for decks, just as swift rail would imply a different sort of decision making.

Distances matter in networks. Go to page 20 is much different than a note made available by a link. In relating ideas, hypertext is an epistemology of distance. In Graphs, Maps, and Trees, Moretti makes available demonstrations of relations between texts, which, in a way, shortens their distance between one another. What kind of relations, for example, exist between Beowulf and the Book of Songs?

It’s not that short a distance between relating Los Angeles and Hartford if a father could leap across that distance more quickly than by using a plane or re-conceiving the amount of energy expended to visit Boston from Bridgeport with the use of solar trains. Underlying any new technology is an ecology and an infrastructure and a new set of metaphors made tangible, like replanting beans where we once planted tobacco.

At the moment, the goods exist to create new markets for which people could make contributions. This is how literary ideas link to roads. New literary forms, new forms of travel, new forms of work. What’s the plan: we need this much new track, these many trains, this kind of energy, and this kind of skill to make it all work. And don’t forget the nano-solar paint to make cars look pretty and run well–and thus a new economy emerges. What hypertexts would follow from that?

Hypertext and Weblogs

Will Richardson reacts positively to a statement by Kathleen Blake Yancey of NCTE:

And that is a crucial distinction, I think. Yes, we write to communicate. But now that we are writing in hypertext, in social spaces, in “networked publics,” there’s a whole ‘nother side of it. For as much as I am writing this right now to articulate my thoughts clearly and cogently to anyone who chooses to read it, what I am also attempting to do is connect these ideas to others’ ideas, both in support and in opposition, around this topic. Without rehashing all of those posts about Donald Murray and Jay David Bolter, I’m trying to engage you in some way other than just a nod of the head or a sigh of exasperation. I’m trying to connect you to other ideas, other minds.

(links in original)
By following a few links, I was led to NCTE’s list of abilities for the 21 Century

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

* Develop proficiency with the tools of technology

* Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally

* Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes

* Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information

* Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

* Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

Someone at NCTE should propose a paper or workshop at Hypertext 09. In any event, this could get interesting as hypertext becomes a part of writing curriculum.

Thanks Will.

Science and Technology

I just wrote a long note at change.gov concerning the technology area in the agenda section. The emphases on the transition website express priorities and thinking I’ve been hungering for from a government run by responsible adults. Here’s partly what I responded to, under the preparation section:

Make Math and Science Education a National Priority: Recruit math and science degree graduates to the teaching profession and support efforts to help these teachers learn from professionals in the field. Work to ensure that all children have access to a strong science curriculum at all grade levels.

This is laudable but as a priority it limits the scope of realistic initiative in “technology” which is and has always been more that the sum of science and mathematics. Smart users of technology may not be mathematicians and scientists; nor will good science and math teachers touch every area where technology is important for designers, writers, and coders. In new media, science works with art or should to innovate and change systems.

We need rounded priorities, don’t we? On the change.gov website technology needs greater diversity. Some mention of hypertext would be nice.

Flourishes

Wallace Stevens wrote that a man could be taller than a tree. Here’s how he put it:

I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

The proportions of human space are distorted by the senses. That’s one reaction. Another observes the relation Steven’s discovers about size and how we measure it. What impulse, in addition, sends us off to measure ourselves against trees? It’s an odd thing. Let me stand against a tree and consider my measurements in relation to something grand and massive or let me stand against a tree and understand where I am. Because sometimes this can be difficult to do.

It would appear to be a meaningless or simplistic action. Perhaps like writing a poem or a story. Sometimes we see things we don’t want to see; sometimes images come that we hadn’t considered in a flash or in the car or while pecking at a line, something significant, disturbing, colorful, grand. A beetle becomes a turning planet. The stripe of a finger through dust becomes the top of a giant letter J or someone having just pushed through a pesticide cloud.