Hypertext & Lexia: World Sustainability Project

Summary: Track project hypertext and Lexia.

WSY Home | Project

Building hypertext rhetoric as RAD

Build complex worlds that intersect:

  1. Lexia are rendered as self-contained encapsulations written ala Yahoo! Style but connected per Hypertext into a software application, the WSY Learning Machine project, to use a familiar metaphor.
  2. Method: Map various levels than wire into multidimensional Hypertext. This keeps me on track and helps to manage project, that easily overwhelms html management method. Landow's references as model. Improve as def list to include annotation? Or is Landow the paradigm?
  3. Theme: Economic globalization as disabling analysis contradicts Bioregional Lifeworlds (Husserlian, QCT) that respond through the Double Movement of the enabling analysis. Thus, this fulfillls mission of book with Mike but keeps me intellectually stimulated and engaged. Hypertext permits cpture of external links to abbreviate my work. Aim at classes. So, two intersecting hypertexts: ESS2 + WSY. Note: Brown's intricacy, empiricical grounding, and complex of interactive factors, rendered in html.
  4. Disclosing worlds through hypertext: As in Harlan's superstructuralism that gave way to his imaginative worlding. hypertext. The purpose is to elevate "According to Heidegger our nature is to be world disclosers. That is, by means of our equipment and coordinated practices we human beings open coherent, distinct contexts or worlds in which we perceive, feel, act, and think."  Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, "Further Reflections on Heidegger, Technology and the Everyday," in Nikolas Kompridis, ed. Philosophical Romanticism, New York:Routledge, 2006, 265. See wikipedia on worldhood, also alethia.

Literary form: from Lexia to Hypertext

Lexia are only fragments or aspects within a networked whole, which I call, below, a theme but is really a text. Landow offers a mastery of hypertext --- see his marvellous web site. Lost is the articulation of an integrated and coherent hypertext within which connected Lexia provide readers a variety of paths through the project theme.

Implicitly, rhizomes germinate and develop from within and underneath Empire, totalizing systems at the civilizational level. They subvert Empire: [quote from 1N, netbook] The rhizome concept supports the civil discourse of the public sphere so basic to Habermas.

Improvements are sorely needed:

  1. Lexia are but mere fragments that embed within a whole that is a text: that which is woven. The right track: literary theory informs this work. Related: codes.
  2. RAD and programming elevates the literary form that I might encompass and deploy, but I must discover and articulate this form, hypertext rhetoric.
  3. The basic grammar and vocabulary of English is the underlying code, where I must excel. Period.
  4. I fail to reference. See Landow but expand to annotation and dd. (See review.)
  5. My text is hypertext done in Dreamweaver. Learn these tools, as well as CSS.

So, hypertext rhetoric must be defined:

  1. The text comprises a whole, while Lexia only a part. The basic (condensed) unit for me is within div h2, as is this envelope. My basic unit of hypertext rhetoric is h2. Must raise to h0, thence to h1. See surftrail.
  2. "There is nothing outside the text," says Derrida. Thus Husserlian phenomenology, my prior mode, evaporates. The text is thus an object in itself.
  3. The basic definition of the text is "that which is woven," as in textile. TBL weaved the web. All webs are woven, thus text. Thus, intricacy, pattern, diversity within a whole is tacitly acknoweldged.
  4. Landow defines, til this day, hypertext rhetoric. (See toc.)
  5. Ultimately, texts must be readerly, so that readers are served, can co-author the text by their reading, and can contribute to versioning the text. Jakob Nielson masters this as usability.

Rhizome and hypertext ontology

Rhizome as organization form for hypertext, from Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, provides an impromptu po-mo form for an evolving but de-centered, non-hierarchal, highly distributed, organic development of hypertext. I had been searching for the appropriate term to capture the form and development that I had intuited. Found it in media studies thesis of Cheun-Ferng Koh.

Lexia within themes

The title, Lexia, refers to the Roland Barthes: Understanding Text Glossary: "Lexias are the smaller sections of a larger, master text" or blocks or "units of signification." The outlines below assemble my Lexia on my project.

Two themes emerge within which to gather Lexia:

  1. Anthropocene, Technosphere, Noosphere expands on the ENST209 World Sustainability course that I co-teach with Professor Michael Edelstein. This resembles the book we are doing for Paradigm Press under the editorial supervision of Dean Berkenkamp.
  2. I have committed in the fall, 2010, to two new courses: SUST640 Economics of Sustainability and ENST305 Ecology, Economics, and Ethics. I have organized both courses in the fall 2010. In particular, I have written (built in hypertext) a second version of Economic Strategies for Sustainability, an article that I have published that I use to introduce sustainers to economics. Indeed, I find this an essential lacuna in understanding sustainability. The essay, Economic Strategies for Sustainability 2.0, is tailored to Ramapo College students and will be used extensively to support their learning and fill a hole in our program. This effort serves two courses: Economics of Sustainability and Ecology, Economics and Ethics.

StoryWorld = Text + Paratexts.

From Jonathon Gray, a media studies approach to how to build the site:

  1. Text is the main event, but short and clearly presented, ala ReWork and Yahoo! Style Guide. This simplifies and focuses the composition. There are here two: ATN and ESS 2.0. These are relatively fixed.
  2. Paratext directs and enhances the main text. The paratext introduces, expands, supplements, resources the text. Text + paratext = package, all rendered in html, hypertext.
  3. Intertext embeds and connects the package with both cyberspace (text) links and references to books and articles, print texts. These are depicted as three concentric circles.
  4. Other terms of use here: network, matrix, ensemble | chunks, tuples

I. World Sustainability: Anthropocene, Technosphere, Noosphere

Summarizes work for course and with Mike for book. There are four parts to the course/book, which I have extended under the title Anthropocene, Technosphere, Noosphere.

Part IV: The Enabling Analysis

Collect all my work and extend to noosphere. Stresses civil society organizations but bolsters PP.

Economics of Sustainability: New Course, Spring 2011

Economic Strategies for Sustainability 2.0 for use in SUST640 and in EEE below

  1. Build app files:
  2. Legacy of ecological economics

EEE, New Preparation, Fall 2011


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