Cross-Cultural Blog

Hi, nice to meet you all.

My name is Vuki and I'm in the University of Sydney 'Page to Screen' English class.

I'm 22 and in the final weeks of my Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications). So much like you I'm in that last minute rush of completely assignments with nowhere near enough sleep. My majors are English and Media studies.

Something we've been grappling with for a large portion of this course has been the form of hypertexts.

During the week I came across a story from Frankfurt, at the world's largest book fair. It said that the sales of e-books would surpass traditional print models by 2018, thanks to the rise of portable e-book readers.

I'm the first to admit that we are not at the forefront of technology in Australia, and we're certainly lagging in terms of e-books readers.

I'm curious to know whether any of you have used a product like the Kindle e-book reader. If so, how has this affected the way you read a book? Is it still too cumbersome?

It seems like the real breakthrough will be when we have the mass market adoption of flexible LCD screens which will allow us to have a portable e-book reader that can look and feel like a traditional book. I'm keen to hear your opinions!

Hullo

My name is Lily and I am from Sydney Australia. I am enrolled in the Page to Screen class in which we study the emergence of hypertext and its impact on literature specifically the role of technology on written and oral discourse. Two of the texts that we have studied are House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. Although we have studied other hypertext literature, for me these two texts in particular transcend the boundary between the print media and hypertext in a way that challenges the reader to engage in and with them that is different from books. Reading hypertext requires more than simply visual skills but also navigational skills as we hop, skip and jumps from one narrative to another or from one lexia to another. Of course, while I find this new form of literature exciting, it is also frustrating because I adore reading books - with hypertext literature, though, the constant mouse clicking and to-ing and fro-ing around the labrynthine structure that is hypertext often causes me to lose my way ... but, it is challenging, it is different and ultimately rewarding. House of Leave sand Patchwork Girl are my favourites and I cannot wait to finish reading them.

I would love to hear other people's comments on hypertext or any other literary form ... (if there are any others ...!)

Regard
Lily

Hello.
My name is Anthony. I enjoyed reading your posts. I hope you have managed to get some sleep. I am feeling good because I have just completed the last essay of my undergraduate degree in Linguistics and English. I will be returning to school next year to do an honours year in linguistics. I will be looking at processes of affiliation and solidarity in what are known as Youth Justice Conferences. These are an alternative to the court system in New South Wales. The idea behind the conferences is that of 'restorative justice' or 'reintergrative shaming'. These concepts are somewhat based on the model used by the post- Apartheid South African justice system.

As I stated before I am also an English major. I have enjoyed this year very much as we have looked at new forms of rhetoric and literature. This semester we have looked at a number of Hyper-fiction texts such as 'House of leaves'. For our first essay I negotiated with Dr Rebecca Johinke our instructor, so that I might submit a creative writing piece. I wrote a thousand word fiction piece called 'Inside Nowhere'. In this piece I wrote a series of short passages. The last word of each passage/page was the first word of the next.Using this technique I tried to draw a comparisons between hypertexts, hyperlinks, the labrynth metaphor and the way the human mind may work.
My central character in Inside Nowhere seems to be dying. In the first passage we see the hospital room through his eyes. He sees his brothers face as fades into unconciousness. In the next scene he is writing a letter to his brother from where he crouches in a world war one trench, just before an attack is to start. He thinks he is going to die in this attack and is writing for the last time. I will not rewrite the whole piece here but hopefully you can see how I tries to link the sections. The scenes drift like the centrals characters final thoughts. In the piece I employed some non traditional textuality. I used the words not just as semantic vessels but also as brush strokes. For example in the opening passage when the central character is fading into his inner space. I describe this as sinking into a long dark tunnel. To reinforce this visually, I formatted the text so that the words on the page actually resemble a tunnel. I carried on with this use of formatting as picture making and as an adjunct to the narrative throughout the rest of the piece.
It was a lot of fun to write.
I hope this has been interesting to read. I look forward to further interactions.

Hi Jocelyn, Elizabeth and Arthur,

Zoe here from the University of Sydney, Australia. It is a pleasure to meet all of you. I thought I might follow suit and introduce myself. My majors are English and Psychology, and this is my second last class EVER. Which is a good thing as I'm increasingly feeling too old to be here. In my other class yesterday the teacher asked us to put up our hand if we were born in or before 1984 and alas I was the only person (except the teacher). Embarrassing. Anyway, I took my sweet time to do my degree because I like putting on plays and they greedily ate all my time.

I am talking to you as part of a hypertext course, which is the last course I will do for my degree.

Have you guys found this forum to be a helpful way to learn about cross cultural communication? I am new to this, so I am wondering whether this structured method offers some sort of fulfillment beyond what you have gained through your own personal adventures through the internet?

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Zoe.

Hi Jocelyn, Elizabeth and Arthur,

Zoe here from the University of Sydney, Australia. It is a pleasure to meet all of you. I thought I might follow suit and introduce myself. My majors are English and Psychology, and this is my second last class EVER. Which is a good thing as I'm increasingly feeling too old to be here. In my other class yesterday the teacher asked us to put up our hand if we were born in or before 1984 and alas I was the only person (except the teacher). Embarrassing. Anyway, I took my sweet time to do my degree because I like putting on plays and they greedily ate all my time.

I am talking to you as part of a hypertext course, which is the last course I will do for my degree.

Have you guys found this forum to be a helpful way to learn about cross cultural communication? I am new to this, so I am wondering whether this structured method offers some sort of fulfillment beyond what you have gained through your own personal adventures through the internet?

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Zoe.

G'day,

In response to Elizabeth, I think your choice of Biology and English is a most unique one, notwithstanding the kind of psychoanalytic potential of such a combination, but the possibility that you could use an analysis of language to undermine violent policies on the environment. You could find the deep structure of policies by deconstructing its language.

I think McCain will strangle those salamanders. If he wants to continue the war on terror, he's sure gunna want to start a war on the salamander!

From a distance it would seem you guys need more liberal policies on the environment...

In Australia it's kinda different though. Liberals are more like your conservatives over there, as you might probably know. So we had a 'liberal' government for a decade or so who pursued, arguably, the same violent policies on the environment in Tasmania etc.

But a little below the surface from this: to what extent is violent policy towards environment similar to the violence on the body inflicted by hypertext in a hyperreal environment? I argue that the reading environment is destroyed and the body eradicated at the site of a hypertextual reading. It is a war on dialogue, trapping the reader and annihilating any possibility of an understanding of the 'Real' (what lies behind the screen, the author's body) or the Other (dialogue with text).

To what extent is hypertext threatening to undermine and thwart the survival of the reader by eliminating the possibility of an 'Other-ly,' dialogic reading environment??

Greetings Jocelyne, Arthur and Elizabeth,

My name is Bec, I'm a third year English and government major at the University of Sydney. I've not got long to go until I finish my pass degree (one more semester) and then eventually commence an honours thesis in government and policy. I'm excited to meet you all online and look forward to the discussions we'll be having. :)

In our course we've been covering a range of issues when it comes to encounters of hypertext. One of the most interesting aspects of this for me has been the problem of translation.

Arthur you mentioned that you were having research issues when it came to the translation of information from Korean to English. Translation is complicated because in engaging in it (whether it be from one language to another, or say from a page to the computer screen), we invariably assert our own interpretation and understandings onto the 'text'/data or information. The very fact that what we are left with after translation is not the same as what we initially encountered speaks to this.

But what does this ultimately mean? Is everything we do/say/write lost in translation? Are we constantly creating new 'texts'/meaning? Is there a line to be drawn, and if so, where is it?

Hello all,

I hope you have been keeping well since last we spoke (or, better, typed). As for me, I have not so surprisingly called my decision of majors (Biology/English) into question once (or twice or thrice) again. Mathematics and computer science and creative writing and anthropology are now on the table, may it please the court.

But I am distracting you from the aim of this exchange. Please bear with me as I attempt to respond to some of the very thoughtful queries you have left us.

1. The Kindle e-book reader has certainly attracted a good deal of media coverage here in the United States. I have read magazine articles philosophizing about its potential and have come across it on amazon.com (where it was featured prominently). But I have not used it myself. I am at least a little reluctant to do so. For I am something of a traditionalist where reading is concerned. For years I have answered questionnaires (“What is your favorite pastime?”) with descriptions of spending hours with a book in a quiet corner on a quiet day. There is something to be said for the tactile experience of page-turning and book-carrying. And also the cognitive style. To borrow from the terminology of Edward Tufte (who claims PowerPoint is evil, and from whom we have recently read in class), a book is generally a high-resolution source material. The visual plane is expansive and there is a high level of information exchange per unit space (a printed page). A small electronic screen eclipses this spatial breadth. I have in the past been interested in studying speed-reading techniques. I recall now one statistic from my studies which seems germane to this discussion: “Research shows that reading is around 25% slower from a computer screen than from paper. This difference generally increases with increasing reading speed.” (http://www.readingsoft.com/) I think that there is some danger in mass digitization. This is not to say that the Kindle cannot succeed at all as an effective incarnation of reading – surely it presents many benefits of convenience and ingenuity – but I worry that a complete paradigm shift would overwhelm us. I would argue for a revival of the lost art of letter-writing (a parallel model), if only because the interaction of paper-to-page encourages a sort of communication (perhaps more careful) not to be found in translating ideas from keypad to textbox.

2. As for Zoe’s question: This one post (“Let Sleeping Dogs Lie”) comprises the whole of our foray into the blogging experience, so I don’t know that I can speak with much authority on the topic. But I will confess that I have been checking ccr.stanford.edu with rather a lot of frequency. To hear your perspectives is really a neat thing. We were happily bemused to read your posts – your clever dissections of hypertext impressed us. We have no formal history with hypertext. Your scholarly assessments of it have encouraged me to begin some small research of my own (by way of a series of interconnected hyperlinks!) in the field. Wikipedia was a good place to begin. (This invites another discussion: With how much validity do you credit a resource like Wikipedia? It seems to me that students often build ideas after referencing Wikipedia synopses, but neglect to reference such sources in official bibliographies. Academic discourse tends to turn a sour face toward community-modulated databases. Why?) I also quickly clicked through an example of hypertext in its fictive dimension (Shelley Jackson’s “My Body”). This reminds me of the choose-your-own-ending books I came across in my neighborhood library many years ago. There are many permutations on a single theme. It is frustrating in a way: how can you truthfully make the claim that you have “finished a book”? The bittersweet satisfaction of closing a book on its characters and plot and voice, after a long travail, slips away in a digital medium. It is sad and a little jarring. And do hypertextual worlds not seem disconnected in a way, despite their emphasis on nonlinearity? We are burrowing in strangely isolated tunnels, precluded from knowing the outcomes of other possible paths. How do we find the common joint, the vertex where everything converges and the dirt walls of our separate tunnels crumble down? Or is this a thing of impossibility?

3. Bec mentioned the difficulties of translation. I will comment only briefly, but I think it is an inquiry deserving of much careful attention. Yesterday in my poetry and poetics class, my professor praised a translation of Petrarch as consummate, precisely because it sought a literal reduplication of the poet’s words. The translator avoided shaping the translated text with poetic tropes peculiar to the second language. Should poetry translations maintain rhyme scheme, for example, at the risk of altering original diction and semantic choices?

4. Your study of hypertext reminds me of an investigation I made beginning in high school and continuing in university. It concerns the domain of artists’ books, books which are made art forms through an awareness of their physical and ontological properties. For an overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_art

5. Anthony: That is an interesting premise – very knot-like, much as hypertextuality seems to encourage interwoven layers of complexity. For a humanities class last year I wrote a paper on the idea of a “metarecursive conversation.” One bit went like this:

This nesting of character groups and contexts subsumes a device called framing. Framing is reconcilable with the notion of having a story within a story (within a story, and so on). As its premise relies on a sort of “look inside itself,” it falls under categorization as a metafictive device (the prefix meta- signifying “about [its own category]”). In writing this essay, I have applied this concept of changing frames extensively:
a. The narrator of Jacques comes to write a book on how to write,
b. which is then evaluated in a theory class taught by Madame Oretta, of Decameron fame.
c. This class, in turn, is the subject of a tale told by Filomena as an extension of the Decameron’s storytelling trope, as indicated by a third-person observer of the 10 raconteurs.
d. Then Pampinea, speaking in the first person, addresses her companions (the 9 remaining raconteurs) with the story of one Boccaccio, whose renown as an author is just beginning to be known.
e. She starts to transcribe the prologue of the very story into which she is written.
f. But, as it happens, this entire setup (from frame 2 to frame 5) actually comprises the content of the frame-1book’s epilogue.
g. However, the pages of this book are shut by Elizabeth, who hears the phone ring at Stanford University. She answers with a hello.
h. “Hello,” I begin in an address the reader, as the person in real-time who is typing the essay that envelops all of the previous frames.
i. But then I, the essay-writer, am espied by a figure of a further-removed dimension, who states authoritatively that a girl with long hair has just finished her assignment, which reads
j. (and here the entire work begins again).

I haven’t given the context, but the idea is to reflect on self-reference and hierarchical nesting schemes.

6. Did anyone read this far? If so, I commend and admire you, brave and valiant and patient soul. :)

7. I wish everyone a happy end-of-term. It has been a pleasure conversing with you all.

Sincerely,
Elizabeth