INTRODUCTORY MUSING

Sitting in on Intermedia, I still need to introduce myself.  Hello, I am Cindy; I work with biology majors on their senior experience.  I am here to learn more about the possibilities and techniques to disseminate their work to audiences beyond the readers of research papers or honors theses.   My posts will reflect the works we read in class through a non-fiction lens. 

afternoon, a story seems as especially appropriate choice for me as it was first presented as a demonstration piece for Storyspace at a computing conference on hypertext in 1987. In the days before the World Wide Web, we accessed the net to look at files we already knew of from colleagues’ emails or print journal articles.  The files were fully text.  To find related material required either a direct link or a fairly sophisticated rummaging about in a file.  Security was light, but users were almost all professional programmers.  This was fine; we were accustomed to letters or phone calls or article in print journals.  Information came in a linear fashion.  We debated whether to put footnotes on the same page as the reference or at the end of a piece.  Email exchanges, begun in 1982, had already established traditions of maintaining the same subject line and adding new material at the top of an exchange like piling up in a continuous stretch just as our fan-folded paper emerged from printers.

Causality and time were not the only relationships in storytelling, non-linear narratives    Character viewpoint  as described by “[t]he Rashomon effect…[from Kurosawa’s 1950 film where] the subjectivity of perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it”   has a strong tradition in storytelling, as does the alternative eventualities accessed through a character’s thoughts in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence atOwl Creek Bridge” of 1890.   The methodology used in the literary criticism of afternoon by Jill Walkerin “Piecing together and tearing apart: finding the story in Michael Joyce’s afternoon”  draws on an even earlier tradition that goes back millennia, but which became concrete with the advent of printing.

Jewish Oral Law traditions were written down as the Mishnah about 1800 years ago and the inevitable discussion, commentary, and arguments combined with those laws to form the Talmud.  Relationships amidst the passages were made with pinpricks in the days when the text was inscribed on parchment scrolls.  Paging among bound leaves of paper made study far easier than the unrolling of a continuous roll.  By 1520, the Bomberg Talmud established the pagination used to this day.  This Bomberg Talmud also arranged the commentary and argument of the commentary as in a wrap around display much like the growth rings of a tree, with succeeding discussion ever farther removed from the central text.   Current scholars like Rabbi Debora Gordon alludes to this on her own blog:
        [I] “haven’t sat down and created a beautiful on-line syllabus yet with links to all the 
        resources I want the students to see. Well, instead I’m creating a Talmud-style 
        resource — which is to say, it’s not organized in a linear fashion. Neither is the Web. 
        Neither is my mind. But the blog, being Web-based, is searchable — and so is my mind”. 


The move to a webpage adds more layers, more linkages, more ways to embrace a holy duty.  It was inevitable. 


Will this hold true in all non-fiction realms?


Mathematically, a line, a linear representation is described as one-dimensional.   Adding information to either side defines a plane, a 2-dimensional construct as in Abbot’s Flatland. (See the External links .) Do the additional links to an ever-widening scope of information carry us to further dimensions as in Dionys Burger’s Sphereland?  Or do they merely fill in the details on the plane?  Do hyperlinks and Intermedia techniques give us hyperspace and increased understanding, or do they obfuscate the plane of knowledge?   

For fun using some simple special effects in a short movie.