Class 13: Reconsideration, Continued

Held Tuesday, October 5, 1999

Summary

• Selection of a work for ``hyperfictionizing''
• Defining hypertext, revisited
• Intellectual property and class notes.

Handouts

• This outline
• Three sites:
  • Project Gutenberg: http://promo.net/pg/
  • The University of Virginia Electronic Text Center http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modeng0.browse.html
  • The Oxford Text Archive http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/

Notes

• Michelle (wife) and William (older son) had to leave town suddenly, so I'm a little bit more discombobulated than normal. I apologize in advance for anything I might forget.
• Upcoming due dates:
  • Thursday, October 6: Consideration of class project
  • Thursday, October 6: Refresh your study of international Web communities.
  • Tuesday, October 11: Hyperfiction paper
  • Tuesday, October 11: Selected readings (assigned Thursday)
• I'm still waiting for
  • Redos of academic honesty exercises from a few of you
  • Short bibliographies from a few of you
• I hope to return the following on Thursday
  • Revised academic honesty exercises
  • Short bibliographies

Project Consideration

• We decided that as a class, we might work together on a large hyperfiction based on an existing work or works.
  • Today, we'll need to pick the work.
  • We'll also talk a little bit about the structure of the project
• Here are some of the ones that R&S came up with
  • Alice + Looking Glass + Snark + Sylvie and Bruno ...
  • Bellamy novel (looking back from 2000 or some such)
  • Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)
  • Blake Poems (probably not)
  • Jack London (perhaps two versions of To Build a Fire)
    • The first
  • The second
  • Tom Swift stories
  • Gulliver's travels
  • The Confidence Man by Herman Melville
• We may retire to the MathLAN to scan online text repositories. Here are three:
  • Project Gutenberg: http://promo.net/pg/
  • The University of Virginia Electronic Text Center http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modeng0.browse.html
  • The Oxford Text Archive http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/
• I will provide software to support the process once we decide what the process will be.
• Here are some potential steps in the process
  • Segment into pieces
  • Name each piece (at least once)
  • Develop links for each piece
  • Write our own pieces
  • ...

Hypertext, Redefined

• We will continue our discussion of hypertext, returning to issues of
  • internal vs. external linking
  • process vs. product
  • structure vs. intent
  • kinds of links
  • open vs. closed
  • extensible vs. ``fixed''
• It appears that R&S enjoyed the discussion more than the rest of you. That's okay, someday you will also learn to appreciate careful definitions.
  • After all, we're talking about what the course is about.

Intellectual Property and Class Notes

There seems to have been some interest in my throwaway comment about the growing controversy over students posting their class notes. Let's consider the issue, both in terms of the current ``state of the art'' an in terms of the relationship to more hypertextual forms (i.e. would your reactions be different if the students were posting ``hypernotes''?).