Infotech -- The History, Implications, and Contexts of Computing, Printing, and Other Information Technologies

Media Theory

• What is a medium?
• History
• Steve Cook, Writing as Virus: Hypertext as Meme
• Nicholaus Friesner's review of Method is the Message: Rethinking McLuhan through Critical Theory by Paul Grosswiler
• McLuhan's Message
• Simulacra
• No Medium Becomes Extinct
• The Commodious Space of Digital Media

The Culture of Orality

• Language, Speech, and Presence
• Speech and non-Visible Presence
• Kelly Maudslien, Beowulf: Orality and Postliteracy
• Laura Maxwell (with G. P. Landow), Knots: Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Orality, Hypertext, and Literary Theory
• Walter J. Ong on Orality

Writing and Manuscript Culture

• Writing as asynchronous communication
• The Scroll, Codex (book), and Interword Spacing -- some questions
• Scribal culture
• Tatiana Nikolova-Houston's Byzantine Medieval Hypertexts (Proto-hypertextuality in medieval manuscripts; University of Texas site)

Print Culture

• Print technology and virtual communities
• The Cultural Effects of Print
• Fifteenth-century communications shift from script to print
• Amanda Griscom on Print media
• Bruce Jones, Manuscripts, Books and Maps: The Printing Press and a Changing World
• Jones Telecommunications & Multimedia Enclyclopedia The History of Printing
• John Tolva, The Heresy of Hypertext: Fear and Anxiety in the Late Age of Print

Telegraphy and the Telephone

• Coded, Aural, and Audio-Visual Telepresence
• Media convergences: telephone, television, and computing

Cinema

• David Balcom, Short Cuts, Narrative Film and Hypertext
• Hypermedia and Film
• Movie Book or Video?
• Mindy McAdams, Hypertext Breakdowns

Television and Video

• Leni Zumas (with G. P. Landow), Semio-Surf -- an Ulmerian mystory about TV, video stores, and what have you!
• David Balcom, Hypervideo and Hypertext
• David Balcom, HyperCafe: Narrative and Aesthetic Properties of Hypervideo (winner of the first Engelbart Award

Digital Computing

• A Media-based Look at the History of Computing
• E-text and the shift from physical to virtual
• Nine qualities of digital textuality
• Virtuality
• Matt Hutson's Analogue/Digital Web
• Jeff Pack's Growing Up Digerate -- An Autobiography in Terms of Computers and Computer Games
• Erica Seidel's The Wrong Way to Write/Right: An Autobiographical Catharsis of Reading and Writing
• What If People Bought Cars the Way They Buy Computers?
• Discussion: Electronic Text/Digital Thinking Page vs. Pixel ; participants include Carolyn Guyer, Robert Stein, Michael Joyce and Sven Birkerts

Hypertext and Hypermedia

• Nelson's definition
• The Memex
• Downloadable Memex animation by Paul Kahn and Ian Adelman (French site)
• Forms of hypermedia
• Kinds of Links -- a Basic Taxonomy
• Is Hypertext Fiction possible? (Or does the link privilege poetry?)
• Writing in and for Electronic Space; or the Rhetoric of Hypermedia Authoring
• Mark Amerika, Hypertexual Consciousness
• Michael Di Bianco, Is the Novel Dead Yet?
• Jerome McGann, The Rationale of Hypertext (U. of Virginia site)
• George P. Landow, Hypertext and Contemporary Critical Theory: Barthes, Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault
• World Wide Web Materials created by members of English 111, Hypertext and Literary Theory, 1995.
• Francesca Chiocci, Music in Hypertexts: Toward a Real Media Integration

Last modified 5 April 2005