[e-mail header alphabet soup removed.]
To: TNC@GITVM1.bitnet
In-Reply-To: David Durand's message of Sun, 3 May 1992 13:20:24 -0400
<9205031830.AA21009@cs.brown.edu>
Subject: situated knowledges
Hi. I'm a student of George Landow here at Brown. Is there any chance that I could have this put on TNC? Greetings to all. I'd like to briefly ignore most of David Durand's message and concentrate on the last paragraph, in which he writes:
What would you use this for? How would you want it to work? I always have liked the idea of spatial navigation, but the details remain hazy. How is my distinction between travelling (you get commentary as you move) and spatializing (everything has a location in some geometric frame)? Perhaps traditional hypertext should be "topologizing" since one constructs a certain discrete topology on ones' text and then leaves the reader to explore it.
My question is, what do you (gentle reader) mean by topology? There seem to be several loosely-affiliated, somewhat-competing notions of topology running around in litcrit land. I'm trying to get a handle on as many of them as possible. So, I'd like to know what you think topology is, and how it applies to hypertextual analyses. Naturally, references are appreciated, too.
Cheers.
--J
Jeff Achter "Numbers never prove anything at all. Proofs prove things." --M. Stone
