Unsworth

Unsworth, John. "Second-Generation Digital Resources in the Humanities"
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/DRH2000.html

In this keynote address, Unsworth briefly defines and characterizes second generation digital resources. They are those resources which "are born digital" (complex collections including commentary, annotations, apparati, etc...) and make use of first generation digital-resouces (digitizations of physical artifacts), thus mirroring to an extent the traditional academic distinction between primary and secondary sources. The flourishing of such projects (like the online archives we've been looking at) highlights several changes in the artstic, scholarly, and editorial communities, but, more importantly, it consequently calls for several others: publishers will "have to start thinking more like libraries", libraries are faced with need of incorporating this new kind of publications into their collections, and authors (who will suddenly become a nuisance not only for publishers, but also for libraries!) need to find ways to receive the just credit for their digital work while engaging in "ten-year projects in a medium that seems to change every ten minutes", at the same time dealing with the necessity of an impersonal, as-objective-as-possible language (and "the death of ambiguity is also the death of nuance, metaphor, and poetry"...). Some of the advice that Unsworth offers to the parties involved is based precisely on these parties making an effort to cooperate with one another: "We need to do some end-to-end projects that involve authors, publishers, and libraries in a coordinated (and documented) joint effort [...] [and] Failing that, we need to do more bilateral projects that involve, say, libraries and scholars or scholars and publishers". Unsworth's ideas surely sound good on paper; translating them into reality in such a $$$-driven society will surely result a much grimmer picture. Bot more importantly, is there not a hint of hypocrisy in Unsworth's "brotherly love"-infused message? As an ignoramus in the field, I must abide by what I've been hearing in this class, but if it is indeed true that there is a competitiveness, which borders on spite and bitterness, between different institutions behind some of the most important digital editing projects (say, the Virginia people and the UNC people), how can we expect a collegial cooperation between authors, libraries, and big-buck publishers when there isn't even such a relationship between authors and authors?

Smith

Smith, Catherine. "Hypertextual Thinking." Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning With Technology

Smith's article begins begins with a philosophical evaluation of hypertext as it exists today and moves on to propose a "different vision of hypertext". She summarizes some key concepts from the works of contemporary philosphers Susanne Langer and Walter Kintsch, detecting in both a shared notion of the human mind: "thought is a dynamic system of involvements" (275), and making this postulate into the starting point for her theorization of new models of hypertext, which she hopes to see profilerate in a near future. Smith envisions a "conceptually enriched" type of hypertext that allows for "thick cognition (276). [Clearly, some of the ideas she so convolutely argues for in this piece, published in 1994, are taken for granted today by even the most casual internet users: her hope that "a user could presented with theme links, not only structure or keyword links", and that "users could teach the system what they want to know", has been granted even by the dreaded Wikipedia]. As for the implementation of hypertext in pedagogy and didactics, Smith's main contention is that in order to produce a wave of hypertextually-thinking and hypertext-using scholars, capable of fruitfully stretching the intellectual horizons, a thorough heuristic will be needed. I do think that here she touches on an issue that is still very real today, as I find that my colleagues and my students (as well as myself...), part of a generation with unlimited access to the hypertextual universe of the WWW, are for the most part ignorant about how to make productive use of what the web has to offer. In my experience as a grad student, prof. say "never quote wikipedia!", "beware of google!", or "don't use online translators!", but it's a plain fact that everyone does make a massive use of internet resources (professors included), yet still very rarely (seminars like ours being the rare exception) are students provided with structured advice or a consistent set of guidelines on how to make good use of hypertextual and web resources.