None of the aforementioned blues can compare to tJoyce’s Twelve blue. Being Gass the main source of inspiration for Joyc enotwithstanding, the blueberry jam background is absolutely unique. The story is sorted out in twelve threads, each of them tracing a series of events somehow relate to the mysterious,, poliedric, fascinating and charming nature of this color. Exploring Twelve Blue means poking your nose into different lemmas, connectiong the events and re-establishing connections between the different connections you meet along the way. The ergodic effort a reader has to face lies in preventing yourself from looking desperately for a specific order of things. What it is beautful about twelve Blue and any other hypertext is that you never know how many pages are missing: once again, the effort lies in not looking for the reassuring signals of a book. If someone wonders where is the end or what is the hierarchy, it doesnt exist. Or better, it exists but lasts only until you decide to keep playing with the different lexia. The path you choose to follow is just one among many possible others, and they’re all immersed in the world of possibility. Stuart Moulthrop, a famous hypertext author, says that “hypertext abhors hierarchy, hypertext is hyerarchy”, meaning that – as it happens in a multicursal labyrinth – there’s no precise or right order to follow, or better, there is but it’s hidden until someone from the outside intervenes and turns on the text. Hypertext has no hierarchy nor its ordered in a specific way until a reader comes and gives it one. Joyce’s aim is to give the reader the different hues of blue as they were colors on a palette at our disposal. They are waiting for someone to use them and mix them according to her taste.

Another characteristic hypertext feature we should look at in our analysis is the semiotic of links: how does Joyce use them? How come the meaning goes from one lexia to another? Many studies have been conducted on this topic, about the way in which a link should be created, which word or string of words to link. R. Trigg’s “A network-based approach to Text Handling” is a precise classification of the different cathegories a link can fall into. It focuses mainly on scientific hypertext but there are some good points in the study that help us understand the main features of a narrative hypertext  –sometimes finding a strong analogy, sometimes a deep difference. The main idea is that every link can be described according to its direction. Every link has a physical direction, the one that goes from a hot word to the related text, given by who first designed the hypertext; and a semantic direction, given by the kind of link and by the logical relationship that connects one word to its content. Those directions usually coincide but this is not always the case. Let’s imagine that the lemma B is commenting on lemma A: physically, there would be a link going from A to B, but semantically it goes from B to A.

Going back to Joyce again, there are two outgoing links from each page, one located in text and the the other generated when clicking on the image on your left. Those two links send the reader to two different parts of the text, so that she has to make every time the choice of where to go next. Joyce has made it on purpose and if you try to go back, reload the page and see what would have happened if you had chosen the other link, you see that the hot word in the text has disappeared. Is this a sort of threat, saying that once you’ve chosen your way you cannot come back? Or maybe it has been built under the principle that we should not visit the same link more than twice? The physical direction of a link is thus under the writer’s control: he knows where we’ve already been and tries to guide us towards the points we haven’t seen yet. As for the semantic direction of the links, each of them has its own according to the content and context in which the link appears. How words are well-placed in general – and this is one of the most difficult things about creating a hypertext: through hot words the writer creates expectations in the reader’s mind of which he has to be aware of. If you loose the reader’s attention or elude her expectations, then she won’t be able to follow you anymore and will drop reading and clicking. This is even more true in a narrative hypertext as Joyce’s: we have to build the meaning and if lemmas weren’t connected in a proper way, we wouldn’t be able to follow Joyce for more than a couple of minutes. Though it is Joyce himself who declares at the very beginning that

Life is a river that flows both ways, it doesn’t do get caught us in the threads the water weaves.

Is Joyce trying to tell us that we should let ourselves go in the fabulous blue river of his narrative, without thinking too much about which direction is the best to take, just like water flows without wandering whether it is following an ebb tide or it is going to melt in the sea?

Katherine Hayles uses 1995 as a watershed in the history of electronic literature. From then on a new phase starts, that is, the so-called second generation. This moment is characterized by a vast use of the Internet that opens up to the great public outside the academic context. It was destined to be the most efficient, rapid and multi-functional means of communication ever existed. At the same time, another revolution was taking place: computer were getting more and more “personal” as the costs for buying one were decreasing. However, some pieces of electronic literature already existed before 1995. This was way back when the Storyspace school started developing the eponym hypertext software.

Before going any further, I think we should define what hypertext means. It was 1963 when this term was used for the first time: Ted Nelson thought of hypertext as a method to collect texts and allow readers to link them freely through hyperlinks, so to adapt the nonsequential structure of our minds to a nonsequential organization of information. This is what he said in an interview with Jim Whitehead:

I particularly minded having to take thoughts which were not intrinsically sequential [. . .] because print as it appears on the paper [. . .] is sequential. There was always something wrong with that because you were trying to take these thoughts which had [. . .] a spatial structure all their own, and put them into linear form. Then the reader had to take this linear structure and recompose his or her picture of the overall content, once again placed in this nonsequential structure. [. . .] you had to take these two additional steps of deconstructing some thoughts into linear sequence, and then reconstructing them. Why couldn’t that all be bypassed by having a nonsequential structur e of thought which you presented directly? That was the hypothesis – well, the hyperthesis really – of hypertext, that you could save both the writer’s time and the reader’s time and effort in putting together and understanding what was being presented.

In his famous though curious and almost incomprehensible a book of sketches, Writing Machines, Nelson exposes his project, Xanadu. He is still working on that and many criticisms have been moved to it in time. Maybe it is as out of reach as Coleridge’s Xanadu, but still, it describes an ideal platform for hypertext: “By hypertext I mean nonsequential writing, text that branches and allows choice to the reader, best read at an interactive screen”.

As in an information web, Nelson’s hypertext is made of links and nodes, and the final realization of it was called  docuverse, a system for global information in which every text in the world is at immediate disposal of the reader. She can then link any other branch of text to the main one, making it personal and, through interaction, alive.

Nelson’s idea had a strong impact on the world of computer science and some years later Vannevar Bush – one of the forefathers of human-machine interaction – wrote a famous article, “As we may think” in which he described a device called memex which had a lot to share with the docuverse:

A memex is a device in which an individual shares all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

1989 was the year in which hypertext became eventually popular and widespread. Even though Nelson still claims that that did not respect his initial conception of it, the acronyms http (hypertext transmission protocol) and html (hypertext markup language) show the close relation between hypertext and the Internet. According to what Tim-Berners Lee says, the Internet was first conceived at CERN. It was a way to connect the different departments of the center and to share their information:

The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use. The passing of this threshold accelerated by allowing large existing databases to be linked together and with new ones.

That being said, we have to analyze what hypertext means in a literary environment, that is, what differences the suffix hyper- brings to the traditional and apparently well-established concept of text. According to what Nelson says about Xanadu, hypertext lives on many chronological and spacial axes, it’s animated through links and needs to be surfed, interconnected and played by a user so to become alive. Moving this idea into a more literary field, we realize that the writer by herself is not enough anymore to impose her authority on a text – it is actually shared between reader and writer. The “author” is a fusion between the two, the result of their asinchronous though conjunct cooperation that allows a story to be narrated: The different branches of texts or lexia are pieces to put together.

It is well worth noticing that this definition of hypertext doesn’t exclude many works that were not born-digital, such as the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Apparently there is no difference between those books and an electronic hypertext: it asks the reader to make a decision and among the many links proposed, to click on a hot word and open the relative lemma. Looking closer though it is clear that the difference in the means through which  a text is delivered is crucial to understand not only what meaning the text can convey, but also  how the delivery of text happens. The reader is asked to face the problem of navigation of a text in a completely different way. It is necessary, I believe, to spend some time in analyzing the aesthetics of hypertext in a digital environment, so to understand what impresses our artistic taste and detect some characteristic features of electronic hypertext.

First of all, electronic literature is said to be ergodic. This term was coined by Aarseth from the Greek, ergon meaning “work” and hodos meaning “path”. According to Aarseth, everytime a reader deals with a cybertext, she is dealing with a long, difficult, effortful journey. Speaking of hypertext, the effort lies in choosing among manifold links, open them up, reading, choose again, until you realize you have reached the end. There is another sense in which a text can be considered ergodic, that is, in the hyperlinear reading it requires. Whilst a book can support both a omolinear reading strategy – sequentially, page by page – and a eterolinear or tmesis one – that is, skimming and skipping from one point in the text to another, the digital hypertext prevents us from enjoying this kind of freedom. You cannot impose your own will to the mechanized structure of a hypertext: once you choose your own path, you cannot come back unless you start over and see what would have happened if you had opened another link. There are many other characteristics that could be developed and analyzed but it is better to extrapolate them through the direct analysis of some good works.

At the very beginning of this chapter, I mentioned Storyspace, a software that allows you to create hypertext. Michael Joyce was among the programmers before becoming one of the most famous hyper-writers: afternoon: not only are a story and twelve blue one of the first works created using Storyspace, but also they are considered two masterpieces. The first one is usually labelled as the first attempt of a narrative hypertext. The other one is way more fascinating, in that it communicates an ongoing incompleteness in its lexia. Each of them has been profoundly pondered and written so to give a sense of fiction that lacks narrativa: bearing in mind that “Twelve blue isn’t anything. Think of liliacs when they’re gone”, we as readers can collect the different hues of blue along the way and reconstruct the plot they should be part of.

]]> http://nml.cuny.edu/elit/thesis/2010/11/poesia-e-prosa-questione-di-elettro-genere/feed/ 0 http://nml.cuny.edu/elit/thesis/2010/11/autore-e-lettore-come-il-digitale-cambia-le-regole-del-gioco/ http://nml.cuny.edu/elit/thesis/2010/11/autore-e-lettore-come-il-digitale-cambia-le-regole-del-gioco/#comments Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:12:49 +0000 Beniamina http://nml.cuny.edu/elit/thesis/?p=76 In these first pages of our manual I am going to analyze some fundamental assumptions about electronic literature, as if it is a machine waiting to be turned on. First of all, I think it’s necessary to affirm one main point: literature has to do with texts, created with a markedly artistic and literary purpose – being them prose or verse.  ”Text” is a broad concept, and the reason for this lies in the very nature of the components of texts, that is: words. They give and ask for freedom, creativity, multiformity. Thus, as literature deals with texts, electronic literature can still be considered literature because it still deals with texts, even though their layouts and outputs are not responding to the same expectations as one usually has in front of what is generally considered literature, that is a book.

Behind this apparently innocuous association there lies a sort of short circuit: the freedom given by words to the texts they compound is somehow hindered by the material rendering of it: what we call “book” is tightly knitted to the idea of text and literature. I could see it myself many times: whenever I talk about electronic literature with someone who has never heard anything about it, the first thing that comes into her mind is: e-book, as if the prefix “e” translates “electronic” (which makes sense) and “book” translates “literature” (which does not make so much sense).

Before going any further into electronic literature, I’d like to explain why this association – as not absolutely wrong as it can be – still presents us with some difficulties. The first thing we have to do is thus to liberate literature from the idea of print connected with it, so to free the text from the tyranny of ink and paper. As Katherine Hayles points out in “My mother was a computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts”, one merit electronic literature must be assigned to in this sense is that it uses a completely new format to give the audience a literary text:

It is time for a Copernican revolution in our thinking about textuality [. . .] it is clear that one medium – print – provides the baseline for the definitions [. . .] Thinking of the text as “the order of words and punctuation” is as print-centric a definition as I can imagine.

The Copernican revolution Hayles is referrring to shows two things: first of all, that literature is ready to face a technological revolution, renewing itself through other formats, and that today we still have to wonder about traditional questions on literature, that is, what makes a text “literary”, that is, what are the characteristics has to have in order to be considered as “literature”. And of course, being a book is not enough.

Quoting Hayles again, I’d like to give you her definition of electronic literature: “Electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast “digital born”, a first generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer”.

This is the reason why electronic literature has little to do with ebooks or ereaders: they are new technological interpretations of paper books, a sort of natural evolution steaming from it as happened from parchment to paper. Speaking of electronic literature, we refer to something meant to be created and read on a computer.

It is Hayles again who provides us with a list of characteristics of an electronic text:

1. “With electronic texts there is a conceptual distinction – and often an actualized one – between storage and delivery vehicles”;
2. “Electronic text exists as a distributed phenomenon”;
3. “Although print readers perform sophisticated cognitive operations when they read a book, the printed lines exist as such before the book is opened”;
4. “[. . .] It would be more accurate to call an electronic text a process rather than an object”.

The last point is particularly important because it underlines a basic principle of electronic literature and reminds of Espen Aarseth’s “Cybertext. Perspectives on Electronic Literature”, a masterpiece in that field of studies. In his book he develops two fundamental concepts, that is cybernetics and ergodic literature, showing that even though electronic literature finds its root in the age of print, the invention of database, code and computer have given birth to a new literary phenomenon that renews the tradition of paper literature with a new attitude towards text.

According to Aaresth, the term cybertext refers to

the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. [. . .] it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure that even reader-response theorists would claim.

Thus, cybertext is more than a mere series of words, it is a perspective on text itself and on how it starts a feedback loop between reader and author. Just like Hayles said, Aaresth believes that print has a monopole on literature and that it is time to wake up from this status of “ideological blindness” in which literature and literary criticism have fallen. Textology and textonomy will be the weapons with which the revolution of electronic literature will be fought.

The other term Aarseth introduces in his analysis is ergodic literature. It isn’t a historic category but it refers to that kind of literature in which “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text”. On the contrary, nonergodic literature just asks the reader to follow the lines until they end and turn the page, in a more or less sequential order, and that’s it. Aaresth makes a list of examples of ergodic literature: I Ching, Rayuela by J. Cortázar, Cent Milliard de Poèmes by R. Queneau and many tales by J. L. Borges such as El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan. What do they have in common? They all are literary challenges for their composite nature and for the effort a reader has to make not just to read but also to interact with them. Between reader and text there exist a sort of literary exchange, a frantic semantic loop, a rapid input/output response that way before computers showed up already existed in literature.

Moving this definition into the realm of the WWW, we can immediately identify a deep correspondence between the structure of the Web and the concept exposed in Weaver’s theory: the variables that bring us back and forth from a webpage to another through a wide variety of links are manifold and of different kinds. They depend on how much a topic interests us, how specific is the piece of information we are looking, how much time we have to spend surfing the net and how links are put into evidence. Our reasons for going form a page to another are based on a personal and arbitrary choice. At the end of our wandering and voyaging in the ocean of the Internet, what we have is a complex and composite system created through our clicks.

Similarly, interacting with a piece of literature means surfing texts, loitering on some passages, finding crucial nodes and weaving routes from one node to the other. Also, it is not a chance that in a computer network “node” is defined as

an abstract basic unit used to build linked data structures such as trees, linked lists, and computer-based representations of graphs. Each node contains some data and possibly links to other nodes. Links between nodes are often implemented by pointers of references.

Now, if we take this definition into the literary world, we can find that “nodes” can be thought of as the turning points in a story, the ones around which narration happens – being them the most memorable moments or characters, or some meaningful details described in a unique style.  These nodes are linked to one another so to build networks in which stories develop, symbols are evoked, meanings are revealed – including the ones even the author was not aware of, but still, they come to the surface and float at every new reading of the same old page. Every reader, while interacting with a text, creates subjective and intimate conjunctions with the text she is analyzing, and here lies a strong analogy with the web system: we draw our own paths through a text according to the emotions it causes us, the reactions it starts up, the impressions generated while reading. We are somehow asked to navigate to and visit the various ports a work of literature presents us, being them Montale’s Limoni, or the uncountable number of people named Aureliano Buendìa in Cien Años de Soledad. As we travel through a novel’s characters or a poet’s words, as we identify ourselves with them and their adventures, and as they intertwine with each other, so a web page is connected with another, with us, and we also are connected with another page, and then another, and then another one… Thus, literature and the Web are not that far, they share something: they both seem to be inclined to be “navigated”, surfed. Is it just a fortuitous resemblance? I do not think so. There are too many correspondences and similarities to make us ignore this surprising coincidence. That is the reason why I have started searching and exploring in the deep the world of electronic literature.

When I say “searching and exploring” I refer not only to my actual research, but also to an exploration that lasted about 5 months and took place in New York City. Thanks to an exchange program sponsored by my university – University of Siena in Tuscany, Italy – I spent a semester at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I came across a group of enthusiastic scholars and students in the field of Digital Humanities. Giving a clear and straight definition of DH is almost impossible, as the nature of the subject itself is multifaceted and includes a huge variety of topics and interests. Here are some of the definitions given by the participants at the Digital Humanities Day in 2010:

A field of study that looks at the application of digital technology to the research areas of the humanities. It is not necessarily undertaking that humanities research, but examining the methodology and provision of possibilities for enabling that research or new conceptions of related research. The majority of work in this area, however, gets characterised by those outside the field as IT professionals just doing a bit of programming work for them while uselessly banging on about long-term preservation formats, open data, and not really doing real research. -James Cummings, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Digital humanities is a field of study characterized by critical analysis of the relationship between the produced surfaces of digital media and the information structures and cultural structures that produce them; alternatively (or additionally) it is characterized by a critical interest in how humanities scholarship is produced, consumed, and transformed in and through digital media. -Julia Flanders, Brown University, USA

I think Digital Humanities is a kind of “fast-acting glue” that allows scholars with different academic backgrounds to collaborate instantly. -Mitsuyuki Inaba, Ritsumeikan University, Japan

It is clear, I think, that every scholar in every field, from a physicist to a linguist, end up into the field of DH, each and everyone of them with his/her own cultural background but with a common attitude: a deep belief in applied technology and a strong will of easily spreading and sharing information, thus creating knowledge.

The place that helped me carrying on with my project was the New Media Lab at the Cuny Graduate Center. I was given the chance by my adviser there at the Grad Center and coordinator of my exchange program, Prof. Steve Brier, to develop a project in the New Media Lab. My idea was to create something about electronic literature, a sort of database or online textbook, so that its format would have been coherent with the subject I wanted to explore (that is, electronic literature). This is how my website was born: Lit-Liv was created using WordPress and it has two main parts. There is a “general” part in which I’ve tried to explain what electronic literature is, how it was born, who are its main authors…and there’s a blog in which I usually post about various works of electronic literature I find on the web.  My hope is to be able to involve in this project as many people as possible, especially Italian students and scholars, given the scarce attention this filed of study is having in my country.

Exploring such a young and new field as electronic literature, where bibliography on the subject is still poor, has been a tough though challenging and fascinating activity. You have to grope your way forward, be ready to be wrong and criticized. I am having a great time navigating though it, but I always feel like I have a beautiful and marvelous toy to play with, but with now assembly instructions. And what do you do in this case? Summon up all your strength and inventiveness and try to understand which A screw goes with a C bolt.

That’s why I thought writing a sort of instruction booklet was more than necessary. This is what I would have liked to find in this beautiful but unknown world of electronic literature. The structure is the same as a manual, too: the first chapter will be about the differences between print literature and electronic literature. I will also try to explain why ereaders and ebooks cannot be considered as electronic literature. Following the traditional distinction between prose and poetry, the second chapter will take into consideration and examine these two genres reviewing some examples from the English speaking world. The third chapter is focused on one of the most interesting web artists and media writers of the last ten years, Christine Wilks. Two works of her have recently been included into the last issue of the Electronic Literature Collection released by the ELO.

Prima di entrare nel merito dell’argomento della tesi in sé, credo sia necessario fare alcune precisazioni su come esso abbia influenzato il formato stesso della tesi e su come quest’ultima sia giunta ad assumere un tale aspetto. Anche, un tale aspetto.

Ma procediamo con ordine: un giorno non meglio specificato mi incuriosii di questa letteratura elettronica. Ne avevo sentito già parlare ma la mia nozione di cosa fosse esattamente era piuttosto confusa. Elettronica nel senso di libri di carta trasportati nella rete? Elettronica nel senso di e-books? Ora che riesco a rispondermi, mi dico: Non esattamente. Quando parlo di letteratura elettronica mi riferisco a lavori creati utilizzando strumenti che lavorano in digitale e che quindi hanno bisogno degli stessi strumenti per essere letti. Più in generale, letteratura elettronica è un’etichetta per tutti quella letteratura che non vive sulla carta stampata. Né del resto potrebbe: per essere sicuri che qualcosa possa essere chiamato “letteratura elettronica” basta provare a portarlo su carta: se l’effetto che sortisce non è quello aspettato, o se addirittura non sortisce alcun effetto, allora quella è letteratura elettronica.

Questa semplice e immediata controprova dimostra un principio chiave, su cui a mio avviso si basa la stessa letteratura elettronica e che ha guidato la sua nascita: il mezzo che scegliamo per creare un qualsiasi esemplare di letteratura influisce enormemente sia sulla sua ricezione sia sul processo creativo che l’ha generato. La spartizione dei beni tra i due figli del formalismo russo, la forma e il contenuto, è ancora di grande interesse (letterario-)giuridico nei tribunali della letteratura contemporanea.

“Electronic literature arrives on the scene after five hundred years of print literature [. . .] readers come to digital work with expectations formed by print, including extensive and deep tacit knowledge of letter forms, print conventions, and print literary modes. Of necessity, electronic literature must build on these expectations even as it modifies and transforms them”

Così dice Katherine Hayles in “Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary”. Il mezzo stampa dunque è quello che ancora vincola la nostra idea di letteratura, ma qualcosa cambia se alla carta sostituiamo lo schermo e all’inchiostro il bit. La consapevolezza di ciò è stata la prospettiva da cui ho sempre cercato di valutare ogni esemplare più o meno riuscito di letteratura elettronica.

Allora ho iniziato a scrivere qualcosa, a buttare giù appunti, a leggere libri che più o meno toccassero l’argomento, a cercare saggi o articoli su Internet per capire se qualcuno prima di me si era occupato di queste cose, come si fa regolarmente per iniziare un qualunque lavoro di ricerca, anche se questo sembrava essere un po’ fuori dalle righe. Con mia grande sorpresa ho scoperto non solo che il campo era molto più vasto e ricco di quello che immaginassi, ma che addirittura, a voler cercare un’origine,  si poteva risalire fino agli anni ’50, quando i primi computer erano apparsi sulla scena. Già allora c’era chi aveva tentato, ad esempio, di fare poesia utilizzando il codice della macchina, o chi aveva usato i primissimi software di videoscrittura, che rendevano il computer qualcosa di leggermente diverso da una semplice macchina da scrivere, per comporre fantasiose composizioni tipografiche. Insomma, non mi stavo avventurando in un terreno proprio sconosciuto. Confortante sapere che l’apparente stranezza dell’argomento che mi accingevo ad approfondire non era poi figlia di nessuno.

Sentivo però che proprio in virtù di questa stranezza non potevo affrontare la ricerca in maniera convenzionale. Per parlare di letteratura elettronica avevo bisogno di mezzi che, coerentemente col contenuto della mia tesi, mi aiutassero a guardare al tutto da una prospettiva più “digitale”. Da qui sono nate le idee che rendono il lavoro a mio avviso non convenzionale da un punto di vista formale ma in linea con i contenuti che espone:

1. Grazie al New Media Lab ho potuto aprire un sito, ospitato dal server della CUNY e utilizzando WordPress, che mi permettesse di mettere il mio progetto su internet e “bloggare” su quello che trovavo a spasso per la rete. La mia idea era di dimostrare che la letteratura contemporanea in  forma e contenuto non ammazza quella libresca ma anzi, è viva, attiva e coinvolgente ugualmente. Certo, come ci sono brutti libri, ci sono brutte poesie digitali, ma non per questo tutto quello che viene prodotto su Internet è da considerare spazzatura solo perché non rispetta il canone, dal punto di vista della forma e di conseguenza anche dei contenuti, della carta stampata.
2. Non mi bastava però di parlare “elettronicamente” di quello che stavo trattando. Visto che è il computer il mezzo principale per fare letteratura elettronica, e visto che anche io ne possiedo uno, come legge di mercato vuole, allora potrei provare a fare anche io qualcosa, a creare la mia letteratura e vedere cosa si prova ad essere un autore, quali siano le impressioni dal di dentro di tutta questa faccenda. Sempre grazie al New Media Lab ho trovato il sostegno tecnologico e creativo di cui avevo bisogno.

Poi da ultimo sarebbe arrivata la tradizionale versione cartacea, basata principalmente su quanto di buono il blog e il sito sarebbero riusciti a produrre. Fin qui tutto regolare. Poi un imprevisto ha cambiato le cose.

Il New Media Lab tiene una riunione al mese in cui i vari sviluppatori di progetti espongono i propri lavori. In quanto parte del laboratorio anche io, una piccola e temporanea parte, è arrivato anche per me il turno di presentare le mie fatiche. È un ottimo modo quello di riunirsi e ascoltare le presentazioni perché permette, a chi presenta, di ricevere un feedback immediato su quello che sta facendo, e a chi ascolta, di carpire idee e condividere esperienze. Proprio durante una di queste riunioni, l’ultima per la precisione, è arrivato il mio turno. Ho spiegato quale fosse l’argomento della tesi, come stessi  lavorando, perché avessi deciso di affrontare un tale argomento. I commenti sono stati ampiamente positivi e soprattutto sono stati numerosi. Ho capito che parlare di quello che si sta facendo e soprattutto avere con chi condividerlo è il modo migliore per riuscire a guardarsi dal di fuori e individuare e correggere i punti deboli.

Questa riunione però è stata illuminante soprattutto in un altro senso: quando ho nominato il blog, un professore di cui non ricordo il nome mi ha sollevato la questione, assolutamente non da sottovalutare, del fatto che in un blog i commenti vengono sempre alla fine. E il bello di un blog sta proprio nel commento, non tanto nel pezzo di testo pubblicato di per sé. Ho risposto che ero consapevole del fatto ma che non avevo idea di come ovviare alla cosa. In mio soccorso è spuntato un altro professore, Drew Lynch, che mi ha presentato questo digress.it. Forse non faceva proprio al caso mio per quanto riguarda l’altro blog, in cui i commenti sono ancora pochi e comunque va bene se riguardino tutto il testo, ma per la tesi in sé poteva tornare utile. È per questo che ho pensato di utilizzarlo. Con un blog avevo iniziato. Con un altro blog mi piacerebbe concludere.

ho scoperto l’esistenza di quello che sto utilizzando ora, digress.it. Un blog che permette di lasciare commenti non a fine pagina ma direttamente accanto ad ogni singolo paragrafo. Bizzarro, mi sono detta, ma utile, se si considera il fatto che quando si scrive un blog i commenti vengono sempre rimbalzati alla fine e bisogna scorrere giù fino a fine pagina per leggerli. Con un blog ero partita, con un altro blog