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"Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know. This is why less is actually more." - Franco Moretti - Conjectures on World Literature

So you are thinking about writing for the web

1. Think about procedurality, encyclopedia, space and participation

2. Think about the simultaneity of the web, the sharing and the meetings

3. Think about the performance of the text in the hands of your audience

4. Think about the rules and how they make people do things

5. Think about the shortcuts, the ways it can be broken, the hacks and the glitches.

"A global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support email" - Wikipedia

The material characteristics of the Internet that result in signifying strategies?

*procedural (composed of executable rules)

*participatory (inviting human action and manipulation of the represented world)

*encyclopedic (containing very high capacity of information in multiple media formats)

* spatial (navigable as an information repository and/or a virtual place)

Close Reading:

Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read. The technique as practiced today was pioneered (at least in English) by I.A. Richards and his student William Empson, later developed further by the New Critics of the mid-twentieth century. It is now a fundamental method of modern criticism. Close reading is sometimes called explication de texte, which is the name for the similar tradition of textual interpretation in French literary study, a technique whose chief proponent was Gustave Lanson.

Materiality: "the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation." Kathering Hayles, Print is Flat, Code is Deep

Performance:

The union of navigation, manipulation and interpretation for the Internet can be accomplished within a reading that is performative. Such a reading is broader than that associated only with the alphabetical and goes beyond the concept of close reading due to the variables and interoperability of the diverse media forms in the work. Performance in reading is related to what Fernández-Vara describes as the interactive applications of the digital, which “may run but are not functional until there is input from the interactor, since someone has to complete the process of making meaning. […] The interactor is thus an active performer along with the computer” (5).

text (n.)

late 14c., "wording of anything written," from O.Fr. texte, O.N.Fr. tixte (12c.), from M.L. textus "the Scriptures, text, treatise," in L.L. "written account, content, characters used in a document," from L. textus "style or texture of a work," lit. "thing woven," from pp. stem of texere "to weave," from PIE base *tek- "make" (see texture).

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns -- but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth. [Robert Bringhurst, "The Elements of Typographic Style"]

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