The Differences between Hypertext and the Printed Page
Two painters, alone in the night, fervently work on their objets d’art. One, concerned with borders and lines, and the obviousness of it all, creates on her canvas a network of lines, circles, and primary colors. The other, thinking more about the medium (or rather the way she can master the colors and images), whimsically lets her hands wander on the surface, combining hues and smudging shapes. As the sun peaks its head over the hillside, each artist will have created her own oeuvre. Networks of lines and shapes, blurred lines and indistinguishable endings, like the paintings, hypertext has achieved that same structure. The goal of hypertext, it would seem, is to create works of increasing abstraction so that the way in which we relate to a written work gradually moves away from its informational content to the object, in and of itself. The transition is, by far, not an easy one. The academy is fraught with controversy over the obscurity of the hypertext medium. Landow, in his section of Hyper/Text/Theory entitled “What’s a Critic to Do?,” attempts to reconcile the differences between hypertext and the printed page—differences that are as blatant, yet as subtle, as those between an abstract painting and an impressionist painting.
The blurred edges of hypertext are represented by the concept of seemingly indistinguishable authorship. The author function becomes less significant as hypertext modes of textuality allow for a cacophony of voices to be included in each work. In contrast to the read-only versions of hypertext (those which cannot be annotated or amended), networked textuality allows for greater flexibility.
The particular importance of networked textuality—that is, textuality written, stored, and read on a computer network—appears when technology transforms readers into reader-authors or “wreaders,” because any contribution, any change in the web created by one reader, quickly becomes available to other readers. This ability to write within a particular web in turn transforms comments from private notes, such as one takes in margins of ones’ own copy of a text, into public statements than, especially within educational settings, have powerfully democratizing effects (Landow 14).
Hypertextual liberation comes from the shift from an expressive author who bears his or her soul in writing, to a community of voices who individually shape the text.
Imagine all possible readers of anything made of words crammed into a bookstore roughly the size of 10 football stadiums.Large for a bookstore?Remember, with only one million readers to accommodate, it's the only bookstore.Just this one, and most days even it is cavernously empty; a single big, echoing bookstore in a nation of 250 million people, at least 200 million of whom can, if they so choose, read.Our potential customers total then not even one percent of the reading-capable population, but only half of one percent.If there are 100 million computers in this country, then there may be 100 times as many computers as there are consistent readers of books.
Moreover, Carr’s article mentions that by using technology of any kind, users tend to embody the characteristics stimulated by that technology. He says that given that the Internet processes information almost immediately, users will tend to value immediacy. To explain, Carr gives the example of a friend of his named Scott Karp who was a literary major on college and who used to be an avid book reader. However, since the arrival of the Internet, Karp skim articles online because he could no longer read as much as he used too. He cannot pay attention and absorb long texts ever since he read online articles. Internet...
When a novel is adapted into a graphic novel, a spectrum of possible interpretations allows for new meanings. Due to the intermedial character of the graphic novel, the translation from text into a graphic novel differs from an adaptation from text to text. Graphic novels have a medium-specific language that consists of a combination of words and images, both following their own rules and conventions. These two channels of the graphic novel, the visual and the textual, enable the author of the adaptation to express her- or himself not only through words but also through images and make them decide what is expressed in images, what is left in words, and what is left out altogether.
The Wife of Bath Prologue and Tale. Geoffery Chaucer. The Middle Ages, Volume 1A. Eds. Christopher Baswell and Anne Howland Schotter. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Fourth ed. Gen.eds David Damrosch, and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2010. 375-408. Print.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed Mack, Maynard et al. W. W. Norton and Co. New York, NY. 1992.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2000. 87-98.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canterbury tales: The Prologue”. Our Literary Heritage. Ed. Desmond Pacey. 4th ed. Montreal, Que.: Mcgraw-Hill Ryerson ltd., 1982.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” is an important part of his most famed work, The Canterbury Tales. One of the most respected highly analyzed of all of the tales, this particular one is important both for its character development and its prevailing themes. It seamlessly integrates ideas on society at that time with strong literary development. This work stands the test of time both because of its literary qualities and because of what it can teach us about the role of women in late Medieval society.
With the Wife of Bath's five different husbands and the search of a new one, she didn't only know what she wanted but how to get it, she did this through ways of being controlling and selfish, but still, came out succeeding at the end of her relationships. The Wife of Bath, with her simple words of the five men she had been with, it was easily detailed with what mattered to her "they were good, and rich, and old, they were scarcely able to keep the statute by which they were bound to me" (p. 191). This is an explaination of exactly what she wanted and how she was able to be continue to be stable. Her unbelieveable control for the husbands she had, in which she thought they would be her "debtor and slave" (p. 189). Chaucer is expressing the sexual, as well as, the controlling side of the Wife of Bath, this also shows the unrealistic expectations she brought forth. At last, she tells exactly how she feels "you should speak thus and put them in the wrong, for no man can perjure himself and lie half so boldly as a woman can" (p. 193). Convicing her husbands ...
The stylistic technique that both texts share is the use of sensory key words and images that not only appeal to the emotion of the reader, but help...
Turkle, Sherry. "Cyberspace and Identity." Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 8th ed. New York: Longman, 2003. 271-280.
Children acquire their native language, which fall within a wide range of languages, at a very early stage of development. During development, a child begins to show signs of verbal communication, usually starting out as cooing, babbling, recognizable words, and later two or more word sentences. This occurrence is also seen in the development of second languages. Second language acquisition is the study of how second languages are typically developed. The process of acquiring our native language is very similar and influential to the development of a second language. The development of a second language has become increasingly popular throughout the world. Today more people are growing up with appropriate resources to acquire a second language, which can be seen from the vast numbers of bilingual individuals.
Looking back over the course of the semester, I feel that I learned many new and interesting uses for technology within the classroom – both for classrooms that have a lot of technology and for classrooms that are limited with technology. For the majority of the class, we utilized William Kists’ book The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age (2010), which provided multiple modes of instruction that both utilized and/or created technology. One of the first things that I remember, and consequently that stuck with me through the course’s entirety, is that individuals must treat everything as a text. Even a garden is a text. The statement made me change the way that I traditionally viewed Language Arts both as a student and as a teacher, as I very narrowly saw literature and works of the like as texts only; however, by considering nearly anything as a text, one can analyze, study, and even expand his/her knowledge. Kist (2010) states that society is “experiencing a vast transformation of the way we “read” and “write,” and a broadening of the way we conceptualize “literacy” (p. 2). In order to begin to experience and learn with the modern classroom and technologically advanced students, individuals must begin to see new things as literature and analyze those things in a similar manner.
In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray argues that we live in an age of electronic incubabula. Noting that it took fifty years after the invention of the printing press to establish the conventions of the printed book, she writes, "The garish videogames and tangled Web sites of the current digital environment are part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication" (28). Although I disagree in various ways with her vision of where electronic narrative is going, it does seem likely that in twenty years, or fifty, certain things will be obvious about electronic narrative that those of us who are working in the field today simply do not see. Alongside the obvious drawbacks--forget marble and gilded monuments, it would be nice for a work to outlast the average Yugo--are some advantages, not the least of which is what Michael Joyce calls "the momentary advantage of our awkwardness": we have an opportunity to see our interactions with electronic media before they become as transparent as our interactions with print media have become. The particular interaction I want to look at today is the interaction of technology and imagination. If computer media do nothing else, they surely offer the imagination new opportunities; indeed, the past ten years of electronic writing has been an era of extraordinary technical innovation. Yet this is also, again, an age of incubabula, of awkwardness. My question today is, what can we say about this awkwardness, insofar as it pertains to the interaction of technology and the imagination?
The traditional education environment is starting to implement new ways to teach students with the rapid development of technology. One strategy is the use of the internet to communicate, listen, and share ideas among students and professors alike; specifically the use of the internet realm in wikis, blogs, and podcasts. Blogs are either a website in itself or a part of a website where something like an interactive journal is being used; a person can write about anything they wish, link or show images, and decide whether other people can comment on the blog entry. Wikis are websites or webpages dedicated to providing information about a topic and can be edited by either the members of that site. Podcasts are digital files in the form of audio, video, or both that can be downloaded online onto computers, MP3 players, certain phones, and many more devices. Wikis, blogs, and podcasts could positively alter the educational format of lectures for students.