And now for some scholarly links and comment. jill/txt has an interesting post drawn from her upcoming presentation at Digital Textuality meeting in Lyon, later this month.

At our last meeting, I presented the concept of feral hypertexts, hypertexts that have gone wild on the net and that defy the kind of pre-planned structures that we have traditionally seen as necessary to steward our collective knowledge. Examples of feral hypertexts include weblogs, wikis and other bottom up or self-organising systems of texts. There are in fact several ways in which such texts organise, but rather than being hierarchical and centralised, where themes are predefined by a central editor or group of editors, they are bottom-up, providing flexible structures which can be filled by a vast and changing group of contributors. Themes emerge, and are visualised by the infrastructure of the system, through devices such as collaborative editing (Wikipedia), tagging or a folksonomy (Flickr, Del.icio.us, CiteULike) and trackbacks (weblogs).

At this meeting I would like to explore in more detail what this might mean for our praxis of developing and editing critical editions of texts, inspired by the discussions we had in Bergen a few months ago, and the examples of critical editions I saw in the research group.

I like the concept of feral texts but I'm not sure I can see that weblogs are such by definition. Even pulling the following from her paper, link under "feral hypertext" above, doesn't help me see how a weblog in its totality is feral by definition.

What feral hypertexts have in common is that they have reverted to the wild, in one respect or another. They are no longer tame. They won't do what we expect and they refuse to stay put within boundaries we've defined. They don't follow standards—indeed, they appear to revel in the non-standard, while perhaps building new kinds of standard that we don't yet understand.

I can see how the use of weblog materials can so constructed. I have thought about the predatation environment that surrounds blogging through quotation and trackback. But I think the feral aspect is a secondary one. Texts are produced through the good wishes of the writer but then can become feral when they "escape" from the boundaries of their original pages. Clearly I need to take time to read jill's paper and absorb the nuances of her description.

Lord knows that I accept the following quote and have certainly seen those characteristics played out in my own research both directly and indirectly.

Perhaps it is more useful to think about new kinds of textuality as more akin to performances than to the texts produced in the 19th century. Walter Ong suggested that our electronic media might be viewed as a secondary orality, and the living web has much in common with oral traditions.

jill's work on this vein is important to my own, in particular to a piece I need to finalize for submission.  That piece deals with issues of feedback and calibration in weblog performance and addresses some of the same issues as lose of control over the performance once is has left the safe boundaries of its home url. Another thing to work on post quals.

Posted by prolurkr at September 5, 2005 10:43 AM

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