Conference Paper

On Links To Be: Exercises in Style #2

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Abstract

This contribution extends the discussion of the types and uses of links bootstrapped by Mason and Bernstein\'s “On Links: Exercises in Style”, focusing on how authors use marginalia and annotations as links to the future. We argue that the development of a common semantics of “links to be” is needed in order to systematise individual authorial practices, provide greater interpretive understanding for readers and enable the development of new tools. We present examples on different types of annotations from the Holographic Vernon Lee project and provide our own exercises to formulate a preliminary framework of links to be.

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Chapter
In this chapter, the author presents practical discussions of digital technologies as applied to Melville. Computation involves calculations based on human constructions; some new media theorists have even suggested that computer programming languages are a form of literature or craft. The modern day software program consists of linguistic instructions that translate into machine code rendered into binary digits (0s and 1s). Melville engaged with computing as a concept of calculation. Melville's cognitive and aesthetic plasticity shows in his reckonings, in the double sense of counting (quantification and pattern‐seeking) and accounting (narration and reflection). Melville's fascination with reckoning and craft also reveals a penchant for computing and meditating about death. Creating machine readable scholarly documents can generate new research questions, models, and conceptual metaphors. Even with the digital tools available to a twenty‐first‐century scholar, some textual problems seem incomputable.
Book
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This books ushers in a new way of talking about social phenomena. It develops an ontology of social objects on the basis of the claim that registration or inscription-the leaving of a trace to be called up later-is what is most fundamental to them. In doing so, it systematically organizes concepts and theories that Ferraris's predecessors-most notably Derrida, in his project of a positive grammatology-left in an impressionistic state. Ferraris begins by redefining ontology as a way of cataloguing the world. Before any epistemology can discuss the validity of scientific or nonscientific judgments, one faces a collection of objects, be they natural, ideal, or social. Among these, Ferraris focuses on social objects, elaborating a theory of experience in the social world that leads him to define social objects as "inscribed acts." He then uses this notion to interpret social phenomena, also in light of a systematic discussion of the concept of performatives, from Austin to Derrida and Searle. Moving into considerations of the present technological revolution, Ferraris develops a "symptomatology of the document" that leads to a consideration of legal systems, finding in them original applications for his theory that an object equals a written act. Written in an easy, often witty style, Documentality revises Foucault's late concept of the "ontology of actuality" into the project of an "ontological laboratory," thereby reinventing philosophy as a pragmatic activity that is directly applicable to our everyday life.
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KMS is a commercial hypermedia system developed by Knowledge Systems for networks of heterogeneous workstations. It is designed to support organization-wide collaboration for a broad range of applications, such as electronic publishing, software engineering, ...
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Annotation is a key way in which hypertexts grow and increase in value. This paper first characterizes annotation according to a set of dimensions to situate a long-term study of a community of annotators. Then, using the results of the study, the paper explores the implications of annotative practice for hypertext concepts and for the development of an ecology of hypertext annotation, in which consensus creates a reading structure from an authorial structure. KEYWORDS: annotation, study, spatial hypertext, readingoriented systems, consensus. INTRODUCTION Annotation is a fundamental aspect of hypertext. In theory, hypertexts grow and change by way of addition -- readers respond to hypertexts with commentary, make new connections and create new pathways, gather and interpret materials, and otherwise promote an accretion of both structure and content. In so doing, they crucially augment an existing body of interrelated materials. The foundational work in our field arises from such an ...
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