Sep 21st 09
Posted by justin in CCR601
Brooke, Collin. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2009.
Chapter Four
Executive Summary:
In this chapter, Brooke goes over a lot of the same territory he covered in Making Room, Writing Hypertext. Here he recaps such issues as containerism, spatial practice (Lefebvre’s perceived space), and the situation of arrangement in contemporary hypertextual scholarship. Yet, after rehashing and revising his thesis, he discusses the notion of patterning (the new rhetorical arrangement tool in hypertextual worlds) in the context of databases and tag clouds. In his discussion, Brooke contends that databases are not what Manovich termed flat lists of items that don’t tell stories. Rather, Brooke recommends looking at databases as sites of arrangement toward narratives. Databases and narratives are not “enemies” as Manovich claims; rather, they are designed, structurally, to yield meaningful information about encounters between database and story. This is most obvious in Brooke’s description of Amazon.com’s databases on pgs. 100-102. Once patterns in database information are discovered, the middle ground between readerly and writerly text is found – the patterns shape the narratives but are shaped by them as well because they are always emergent. To name this middling, Brooke uses the term “collection.” This seems to be a nod in the way of social constructions of self for a couple of reasons. First, the collection is the bridge between the narrative and the database. In Brooke’s account, the collection is best understood as a bookshelf of YOUR books. Others might see the books as a database; however, your ordering and understanding – as well as the narratives of attainment and use that accompany each book – and the social conditions that led to those narratives of attainment and use – are the stories. Hence, kairotically (in Rickert’s sense), your collection will lead you to the perception of pattern – what Brooke claims as the new form of arrangement.
Writing Against:
Manovich
Key Questions:
1. How do we conceive of arrangement in the context of the web?
2. How do databases shape our understanding of the pattern in web technologies?
3. How can we use databases on micro and macro scales to come to understandings of arrangement in hypertextual environments?
Sep 21st 09
Posted by justin in CCR601
Brooke, Collin. “Making Room, Writing Hypertext.” JAC 19.2 (1999): 253-268.
Executive Summary:
In this piece, Brooke works to reclaim arrangement from hypertext theorists that have elided the term in due to the “non-linearity” of hypertextual production. In this reclamation, Brooke employs both a time-element and a space-element to better understand the way hypertext can be arranged. The time-element is a hold-over from written discourse. The space-element is embodied in spoken discourse. Brooke indicts Bolter’s and Joyce’s collapse of arrangement into delivery by illustrating the disorientation problem – i.e., readers have expectations of texts, in hypertextual composition those needs aren’t met. This inadequacy is the result, according to Bolter and Joyce, of a user-defined delivery (one of the core realities of hypertext). To address this problem, Brooke describes how usual conceptions of text rely on Bowden’s “containerism.” This problem, one which Derrida isolates as “the repression of pluri-demensional symbolic thought” can best be revisioned through Lefebvre’s explication of space as 1) conceived, 2) perceived, and 3) lived. In this model, perceived space, or spatial practice, is employed to negotiate the “containers that print has encouraged and the paralyzing freedom of an infinitely open space” (263). This is a sort of middling, whereby the reader isn’t left to be inside the container, but can make meaning because the endless free play of signifiers is also not endless. To understand this new perceived social practice, Brooke recommends the adoption of the “pattern.” In so doing, the wreader is able to shift their focus from linear progression and pacing to pattern perception across structural components.
Key Influences:
Lefebvre – The Production of Space
Johnson-Eilola – Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing
Quintilian – The Insitutio Oratoria of Quintilian
Tolva – Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word
Writing Against:
Bolter – Writing Space
Joyce – Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics
Major Concepts/Questions
1. How do we conceive of arrangement in hypertextual creations?
2. The flipping of organization and formulae on the bottom of 261 seems weak to me. Brooke notes, “Formulae do not help students learn how to organize; rather, they serve as a substitutes for the very act of organization.” Isn’t this invention work? Are we talking of reinventing the container on every project? Revisit.
