Words’ End

My prelim is in one week and two hours. There’s a symmetry to this one-two deal that makes me happy. Also, I’ve got an article due on the 30th. Consequently, I have been thinking Very Academic Thoughts. These are some of the things that have been on my mind lately.

Hypertext, the h word, is almost a bad word nowadays. Like Noah did, I went back to Theodor Nelson’s definition. “Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written and pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. [and then in a footnote:] The sense of ‘hyper-’ used here connotes extension and generality: cf. “hyperspace.” The criterion for this prefix is the inability of these objects to be comprised sensibly into linear media, like the text string, or even media of somewhat higher complexity.” (This is from his talk at the ACM proceedings in 1965.)

Nelson’s done with that definition, it seems, it’s mutated and so has the computer. But we still attempt to find a definition for hypertext, or else to coin better suited words.

I am not saying anything new, but keep coming back to this: the “problem” isn’t with the term, the term’s fine. In defining it, Nelson hit on a quality intrinsic to the human experience. Everything, the world, is a hypertext; this is a scary concept to academics, because it is too vague and imprecise. Still, it’s unproductive to deny this, or to shy away from it. The question shouldn’t be whether a set of data is or is not a hypertext, but rather whether it’s interesting or revealing to represent it as such electronically.

The electronic medium is the most suited one in which to define the Roland corpus, because Roland is a hypertext spanning different media. He is in literature, film, theater, music, painting, drawing, sculpture, stone carvings… I’m probably forgetting something. (Are sculptures and stone carvings distinct, or is it all sculpture?..) Combining them, viewing them through the codified electronic eye acts as an equalizer. Any critical discourse affects the way we view an artifact, and critical discourse of several media which takes place in an altogether different medium fails to skew perspective in favor of one of the constituent corpus media. Am I making any sense, and if so, am I full of nonsense?

In writing the to-be-published article (as opposed to my written prelim, which is more than twice as long and will only be read by my committee), I omitted heuretics entirely. It is the lifeblood of my research, but I omitted it, finding it impossible to explain what’s going on with Roland^HT, put forth some preliminary conclusions and defend the heuretic approach, all in 6000 words or less. Greg Ulmer suggests scholarship as creativity, “a generative experiment: based on a given theory, how might another text be composed?” (Heuretics: The Logic of Invention 5). This feels liberating and right, both in my own research and in my thinking about teaching. (I’ll get to implement the teaching next spring, in “Codex to code: an introduction to humanities computing.”)

This’ll be its own article. But not until after prelim. And the two term papers. And the article. And Electronic Cabaret, at which I am apparently reading. Woot.

Besides academia, I am thinking about the summer. For all its foreseeable (and foreseen) difficulties, it will satisfy my wanderlust like no summer before it… mm, save perhaps 2002. Road trip down to Athens, through Roanoke where we get to stay with a friend I haven’t seen since December. After the conference, on to Huntsville, Alabama, where I’ll meet an exceedingly cool laser physicist MUDfriend whom I’ve never actually met in non-digital space. Then Memphis, the Mississippi river, New Orleans. West to Albuquerque, where Scott and Rachel are young doctors in residency and in love. Then Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles. Two and a half months in LA to do work and be with family, then drive north to Nevada, hang out with thirty thousand community-oriented nutjobs for a while, drive back east through Madison and probably Chicago.

In-between, learn perl, encode a 700-page text, digitize all my primary Roland sources.

I can’t wait ’til summer.

Oh, also, I’m thinking of applying for a Fulbright, and to that end am looking for experienced guidance wrt the application process.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2003 at 10:38 am and is filed under digital [humanities|libraries], phd - mechanics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.