{"id":1353,"date":"2015-06-28T15:06:27","date_gmt":"2015-06-28T22:06:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/?p=1353"},"modified":"2015-06-28T15:07:18","modified_gmt":"2015-06-28T22:07:18","slug":"1353","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/2015\/06\/28\/1353\/","title":{"rendered":"From Inner Space to Textual Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bolter (2001) in Chapter 3 of Writing Space brings up the idea of topos<\/em> and topics as places as a way of describing hypertext. I think this idea really helps us organize how writing and reading are progressing not just now but also throughout the history of writing learned in Module 3.<\/p>\n

As an initial premise I want ask how we perceive a topic or concept. For example, we’ll use ‘light.’ We immediately see in our mind what it looks like, experience the feel of it, associate positivity and negativity, connect to scientific understandings, and draw from our past experience and knowledge into our perception of the concept. In this way, a single concept carries a massive quantity of information and feels more like a three dimensional object than a linear series of phonetic sounds. What a writer does is try to reduce all these dimensions into one line on a page. This is what makes writing so difficult. We try to eliminate dimensions and as such, any sense of place. However, over time we\u2019ve worked to restore that.<\/p>\n

Speech has no sense of place. Ong (1984) discusses this concept in Orality and Literacy. Scrolls likewise were written without a sense of place or topos. When writers in Greek and Latin wrote, they didn\u2019t include page breaks (as was the nature of scrolls), sub-headings or even spaces between words (Saenger, 1982). Ancient writing was a way of imitate, conveying and solidifying speech much like musical notation conveys how to play music. Only the reader had a sense of place in the text and the reader was only the medium between the audience and the text (Saenger, 1982). This lead to writing conventions that emphasized rhythmic and fluid prose that addressed an audience that did not necessarily present a \u201cplace\u201d in writing. The flow was more important than the place.<\/p>\n

With the invention of the codex, text was broken down. Chapters and indexes were written to help a reader access information in a non-linear way (Saenger, 1982). These modifications were made for the reader, not the audience. A reader could ask \u201cwhere\u201d is the text was the idea. Because the relationship of reading moved from text-to-audience with the reader as interpreter to text-to-reader, texts could take on more non-linear and visual forms. This culminated in highly illuminated texts and texts with marginal commentary beside the \u201cplace\u201d in the text. In printed texts, writers usually use footnotes, endnotes and other notation to present relationships in a non-linear way<\/p>\n

With hypertext, we move into more intricate non-linear relationships with text. Bolter (2001) suggests that texts can become less like lines of thought or speech but instead be trees of interconnected concepts each with their own \u201cplace.\u201d Later on in Chapter 5, Bolter (2001) suggests that many encyclopaedists tried to create paths of non-linear association through organization systems like Adler\u2019s Propaedia. However, they were cumbersome and difficult to use. In contrast, Wikipedia\u2019s organizational system uses hypertext to create a network of text and fulfill what some encyclopaedists dreamed of. My own personal favourite example of this network is in Wikipedia\u2019s Greek mythology pages. They are heavily hyperlinked because Greek myth has overlapping, contradictory and complex relationships between stories and characters. Wikipedia helps to present the relationships between concepts and help a reader perceive the relationships that linear text cannot accurately convey through creating places for each concept.<\/p>\n

Over time, writers have been trying to convey their multi-dimensional world of thought more accurately. First through writing, then with commentary and intertextual connections and now with hypertext. I believe that the progression of writing technology might be the struggle to convey the complex and interconnected world of thought outside of our minds through the use of space and place (topos<\/em>). Through each successive step, our writing technologies have helped improve how we convey relationships. So over time, we are becoming better communicators of complex thought.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Ong. Walter. (1982). Orality and Literacy. New York: Methuen.<\/p>\n

Bolter. Jay David. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. New Jersey: Erlbaum.<\/p>\n

Saenger. Paul. Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society, Jan 1, 1982; 13, Periodicals Archive Online pg. 367-414. Accessed June 24, 2015: http:\/\/search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca\/docview\/1297911610?OpenUrlRefId=info:xri\/sid:summon&accountid=14656<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Image From:\u00a0http:\/\/www.romansociety.org\/nc\/imago\/searching-saving\/page\/29.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bolter (2001) in Chapter 3 of Writing Space brings up the idea of topos and topics as places as a way of describing hypertext. I think this idea really helps us organize how writing and reading are progressing not just now but also throughout the history of writing learned in Module 3. As an initial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31571,"featured_media":1354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[800002,1231379],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post-2","category-re-module-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31571"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1353"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1356,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions\/1356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540summer15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}