Class 14: National Communities

Held Thursday, October 7, 1999

Summary

• Questions for consideration:

• Assignments (due Tuesday)
  • Readings on Race, Gender, Internet, and Hypertext
  • GVU User Surveys
  • Power at the Margins

Handouts

• Printed packet
  • Some definitions
  • This outline
  • Reading assignment:
    • Readings on Race, Gender, Internet, and Hypertext
  • Web Assignments:
    • GVU User Surveys
    • Power at the Margins
• Readings on Race, Gender, Internet, and Hypertext
  • Beckles, Colin (1997). Black Struggles in Cyberspace: Cyber-Segregation and Cyber-Nazis. Western Journal of Black Studies 21, 1, 12-19.
  • Davidson, Kea (1995). Liberte', Egalite', Internete'. New Scientist (27 May 1995), 38-42.
  • Greco, Diane (1996). Hypertext with Consequences: Recovering a Politics of Hypertext. In Proceedings of ACM Hypertext '96. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery. 85-92.
  • Jackson, Linda A. (1998). Race/Ethnicity and the World Wide Web: The Vision-The Reality-The Vision. In Proceedings of the 1998 WebNet International Conference on the Internet, Intranet and World-Wide Web. Charlottesville, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. 1097-1098.
  • Maso, Carole (1996). Rupture, Verge, and Precipice. In Birkets, S. (Ed.) Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. St Paul: Graywolf Press. 50-72.
  • Rubey, T. (April 1999). Profile of Computer Owners in the 1990s. Monthly Labor Review, 41-42.
  • Simon, Brett (July/August 1998). Inside Publishing: Mean Machine. Lingua Franca, 22-23.
  • Spender, Dale (1997). The Position of Women in Information Technology - or Who Got There First and with What Consequences? Current Sociology 45, 2: 135-147.

Notes

• You'll have to wait until Tuesday for the stuff that I have (it's been a worse week than I thought). I'm sorry.
• Due Tuesday:
  • Today's assignments
  • Your paper

Alice in the Labyrinth

• I've started to set up a Web site for our project. We'll visit that site for the first fifteen or so minutes of class.
  • No, the code for adding nodes and links is not there.
• Each of you should choose two chapters to work on.
  • You may not choose chapter 10, 11, or 12 of Looking Glass
  • Chapters 8 and 9 of Looking Glass each count as two chapters
• We need to decide how you're going to ``mark up'' your chapters.
  • Chunk titles
  • Links
  • Context
  • ...
• My temptation is for you to insert chunk titles in the form

  ::: Title of Chunk :::
  

• My temptation is for you to put links in separate file with a format something like

  Name of First Originating Chunk
    Link1
    Link2
    Link3
  Name of Second Originating Chunk
    Link1
    Link2
  ...
  

• I haven't thought about what the links should look like.
• Issues:
  • Text that yields vs. "Does alice take the blue pill?"
  • Indicating context
  • Special links: next, previous, default, ...
  • Special destinations: random, ...

Online Reflections of Real Communities

We'll spend the last part reflecting on the relationships between real communities and corresponding Web communities.

• Definition: What is a community?
• Definition: What kinds of online communities are there?
• Hypertextuality: Are any of these communities hypertexts?
• Consideration one: How do online communities support or harm the corresponding real communities?
• Consideration two: Does documenting a community in hypertext affect that community?