Hypertext as a research and teaching tool
My belief in the value of hypertext as both a method and mode of presentation is implicit in the nature of this website which is concieved as a hypertextual self presentation. It acknowledges the social and personal aspect of the archive in that it is designed to be:
- a site for personal reflection, investigation and aggregation
- a way of sharing that knowledge
- a point of contact and node in a series of feedback loops
George Landow argues that the intertextuality of hypermedia opens traditional notions of author/work/tradition into a broader space of text/discourse/culture. This opening-up helps us avoid narrowly conceived technological and historic or textual determinism.
Christian Hubert the author of an intricate Hypertext project argues that the hypertextual solution brings us into a new relationship to intellectual and material space.
Hypertextual links, on the other hand, seem to add dimension to the textual surface. It is here that the spatiality of hypertext starts to come into its own, for the linked text suggests a complex spatiality, perhaps resembling the fractional dimensions of of fractal geometries which are more than two-dimensional but less than three dimensional, or the space of "wormholes" which shortcut through time and space, or the reconfigured spaces of telemedia. The space of hypertext is like a constantly changeable constellation. Rather than being a stable territory, it changes according to its mappings, for its features are primarily relational, and those relations can determined anew through every use. It is this capacity for reconfiguration that situates hypertext at the intersection between the urban and the textual experience.
Hypertext Projects
I am currently involved in a number of projects in which I am developing ways of using the facilities of hypertext as a research and teaching tool.
A blog that began as a project for a course in online learning and has evolved into an ongoing space for the collection of information about and reflection on blogging and online learning in higher education
This web project is an evolving space exploring contemporary manifestations of the apocalyptic in current affairs and popular culture. It is being developed in association with my Ph.D. research and is both a research method and a presentation of that research. In exploring the apocalyptic I am particularly interested in mapping a series of multimodal mythic clusters that are evolving through a process of remediation which I identify as a key cultural logic for an age in which electracy is the new literacy of nomadic subjects. This hypertextual presentation foregrounds affiliational logic and although I hope the project accumulates meaning it does not seek to present a single, formal, linear argument.
I have developed a series of course websites which document both curriculum content and approach in a number of courses that I have taught.
