Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 453.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
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Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 10:25:53 +0000
From: Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au>
Subject: Re: 17.420 link anxiety
On 02/12/2003, at 5:18 PM, Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard
McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>) wrote:
Adrian Miles, in "Hypertext Structure as the Event of Connection",
Proceedings of the ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia 2001
(www.acm.org/dl/ etc), in fact discusses anxiety of linking from the very
helpful perspective of hypertextual writing practice on the small scale. He
points usefully to Susana Pujares Tosca's "The Lyrical Quality of Links"
(Hypertext 99). I admit to being wary of essentialist tendencies in both
arguments. What happens to this lyrical quality, for example, when you're
writing a scholarly argument with hypertext and very much need to control
where attention goes and to make sure that it comes back? And don't tell
me, please, simply to write well and it will come back -- writing well is
in part making sure that attention is with you, hugging every turn.
belated engagement... :)
I've also written about this in
Miles, Adrian. "Realism and a General Economy of the Link." Currents in
Electronic Literacy Fall.5 (2001). which you should be able to find at
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall01/miles/index.html
It is also touched on, though from quite a different manner, in
Miles, Adrian. "Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext." Continuum: Journal
of Media and Cultural Studies 13.2 July (1999): 217-26.
which you should be able to find at:
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/essays/cinema_paradigms/ cinematic_paradigms.txt
Yes, I'm very interested in the ontological status of the link in
hypertext. In answer to the question of control, well there isn't much
you can do. This is something that Mark Bernstein has regularly
addressed in his various papers on hypertext patterns and gardens. For
example where Mark might discuss gardening as a model for a hypertext
he also includes how a link might delight, much as turning a corner to
an unexpected vista might delight.
In my own practice my understanding of links is very much from a speech
act theory perspective, though that is distilled through an
idiosyncratic use of some French poststructuralism. Links have a force
that is non or extra linguistic and you can make all the rules you like
around them but this can't exhaust this force. I'd argue that the rules
keep popping up about how to use links because of their intrinsic
excess (you don't need to spend a lot of time making rules for things
that are, if you like, sedate).
So I think of links as being contextually sensitive, and you can't
saturate a context (any context) sufficiently to ensure that the
intention of the link can be guaranteed. I also think that links effect
'qualitative' changes in the relations between parts, which is
something that linear writing can't do (though that is probably an
ambitious claim).
Having said all that, they're minor claims in an even more minor corner
of a minor discipline. :-)
cheers
Adrian Miles
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