For my presentation today I’m going to hand out the draft of the paper I just had accepted to Hypertext ’05, about feral hypertext (yay!), but instead of discussing it directly I’m going to demonstrate the technology, which is I think less familiar to most of the world than to us bloggers.

My basic premise in the paper is that hypertext was developed as an intimate tool — Bush calls the memex “enlarged intimate supplement to his memory”, and although hypertext systems were developed on mainframes at first, researchers constantly discussed it in terms of individual usage. So hypertext was developed for personal, domestic use. Research on hypertext before the web stresses individual users and controlled authoring. Other methods of control included typed links (that is marking a link to a supporting argument as “supporting” and one to a definition as “definition”) and today the semantic web. The thing is, with the web hypertext has returned to the wild. It’s gone feral and we no longer have that kind of control over it. That is turning out to be pretty damn cool.

So today I’ll demonstrate how blogs work (Blogger.com, and how I post to my blog) and then how RSS works and how you can ping a category or use Technorati. I’ll show Wikipedia and the history function, and how easy it is to edit a page. And then Flickr (open API), to explain tags and folksonomies and how patterns emerge rather than being preauthored. Del.icio.us and CiteULike are logical next steps, followed by Technorati tags bringing it all together.

Standard procedure, really, hopefully jammed into 20 minutes, and hopefully illustrated in a way that experts on XML and metadata who are used to editing and authoring (rather than supporting the emergence of) digital critical editions can find things that will be useful to them. And hopefully I’ll be able to put some of the ideas in my paper out there.

2 thoughts on “my talk for the digital text seminar today

  1. Jill

    That didn’t work very well at all. It’s both too complicated and too shallow this way. Gotta figure out a completely different approach. Oh dear.

  2. Christian Mogensen

    Have you looked at Jon Udell’s screencasts as a possible way to cram this much info into a mere twenty minutes? Screencasts are narrated presentations of software interactions, preferably telling some sort of story or explanation.

    http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/02/21.html#a1182

    A good and particularly relevant example of a screencast:
    http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/delicious.html

Leave a Reply to Jill Cancel reply

Recommended Posts

Triple book talk: Watch James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me discuss our 2023 books

Thanks to everyone who came to the triple book talk of three recent books on machine vision by James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me, and thanks for excellent questions. Several people have emailed to asked if we recorded it, and yes we did! Here you go! James and Jussi’s books […]

Image on a black background of a human hand holding a graphic showing the word AI with a blue circuit board pattern inside surrounded by blurred blue and yellow dots and a concentric circular blue design.
AI and algorithmic culture Machine Vision

Four visual registers for imaginaries of machine vision

I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive.  De Seta, Gabriele, and Anya Shchetvina. “Imagining Machine […]

Do people flock to talks about ChatGPT because they are scared?

Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – but yesterday, Eirik Solheim said that every time […]