Here are some additional on-line networks of links
(the authors' home pages, with archives):
 Neil Postman Home Page.
The Camille Paglia Page.
Sven Birkerts: Check out the the Internet Roundtable Society site established for Birkerts.
Jay David Bolter Home Page.
Raymond Kurzweil Home Page.
Ted Nelson Home Page. Or Project Zanadu.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of the Forking Paths Site. This site takes us back to the reseach section, to the library (Cybrary), for this chapter.
John Perry Barlow's Home(stead)Page.
Critical Art Ensemble.
More References for surfing the Web
(that supplement the readings): Virtual Libraries, Virtual Books, Electronic MagaZines, Hypertext, and Copyrights:
Here are a few links to important Virtual Libraries:
 Hytelnet. You can add to the above list by simply searching for various libraries or by going to Hytelnet which telnets you virtually to every library in the world! Unfortunately, there is a note at the site saying that Hytelnet will be discontinued. Perhaps it will be maintained by another person or institution.
Once upon a time, there was a library that we now call the Lost Library of Alexandria. In many ways, our dreams of it have become an archetype of what a library should be. Check out these sites on the revival of the ancient library of Axlexandria and the history of the Library of Alexandria; also see the agreement to rebuild the library.
In the first edition of CyberReader, I included two chapters from Jay Bolter's Book Writing Space, one of which is entitled "The Electronic Book." In his discussion Bolter historicizes the electronic book and its impact on the electronic-virtual library, leading to the (perhaps quixotic) Project Xanadu, which in many ways can be seen as an attempt to realize the dream of the lost Library of Alexandria. Ted Nelson--the conceptualizer of the electronic library and project--summarizes its basic principles in the excerpt that I have included from his book Literary Machine. This Project has been criticized, however, by Gary Wolf in "The Curse of Xanadu." Wired 3.06 (July 1995): 137-52, 194-202. Read Ted Nelson's response at the Project Xanadu site under the link "Wolfsbane". A search for Project Xanadu by way of WebCrawler will give you numerous additional sites to visit.
In the meantime, there are people hard at work putting books online:
The On-Line Book Initiative.
The B&R Samizdat Express. Here you will find a wealth of information in the form of newsletters about various sites on the Web where books have been digitized and are 'free.' (Subscribe to the newsletter.) Also, there are links to other sites.
The Project Bartleby Archive. More books online.
Project Gutenberg will give you:
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Welcome to Project Gutenberg
* What is Project Gutenberg?
+ In English
+ In German
* Project Gutenberg Electronic Texts
* Project Gutenberg Newsletters: Current and Past Issues
* Articles about Project Gutenberg
* How to Volunteer for Project Gutenberg
* Links to Other Electronic Text Archives |
Here are some links to sites on Electronic MagaZines and on Hypertext and Hypermedia:
The best source for 'Zines is John
Labovitz's e-zine-list
Also, check out Chip Rowe's The Book of Zines.
The Voice of the Shuttle: Technology of Writing Page. There are pages of links to browse here. Explore the "Research on Hypertext" category and "Research on Hypermedia." You will find Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" (1945) here along with Stuart Moulthrop's "You Say You Want a Revolution?" (about Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project). And there is so much more.
Useful WWW Sites on Hypertext. This is the best all around site that I have found: It is filled with numerous links from hypertext terms to hypertext markup language made simple.
Brown University and its Hypertext Projects (George Landow). Some of Landow's and his students' webs such as "The Freud Web," "The Religion in English Web," and "The Victorian Web" can be found at Brown U as well.
Eastgate Systems Home Page. Eastgate publishes a lot of hypertext works and the hypertext program "StorySpace."
Four "Authors" of Hypertext Fiction:
Hyperizons: Hypertext Fiction.
Waxweb, "WAXweb is the hypermedia version of David Blair's feature-length independent film, WAX or the discovery of television among the bees (1991). It combines one of the largest hypermedia narrative databases on the Internet with an authoring interface which allows users to collaboratively add to the story."
The Rossetti Archive. The longer name is The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedial Research Archive. If you are in literary studies, you will find this site of special interest.
The Media and Communications Studies Page. There is much here in terms of multimedia that is invaluable.
HyperMedia, Yahoo's list.
Newsgroups (Usenet):
alt.hypertext.
CopyRight and CopyLeft:
The Copyright WebSite.
Copyright Timeline, The History of ....
Copyright, Intellectual Property, Publishing on the WWW.
Copyright, FAQs || Law, Copyright, FAQs.
Transpublishing and Transcopyright. These are two concepts developed by Ted Nelson.
NegativWorldWideWebLand. This site can be lots of fun as it spoofs the idea of owning things such as words or sounds, etc. Click on NegativDiscography and read the links, especially those that have been removed. Click on Intellectual Property Issues and you will find some very important links. Be sure to read the article by Crosley Bendix. See what you can find out about NegativWorld in relation to copyright cases.
Read the previous link on Crosley Bendix along with Critical Art Ensemble's "Utopian Plagiarism...". Setting aside the concept of "plagiarism," Bendix, like the Critical Art Ensemble, argues for the concept of
"appropriation." He says: "I believe it has to do with deep stuff like media saturation and the opportunity for self-defense against media coercion that appropriation engenders. It also has to do with the
Surrealist/Dada concept of
detournement.
In modern terms, appropriation is often about culture jamming-capturing
the corporately-controlled subjects of the one-way media barrage,
reorganizing them to be a comment upon themselves, and spitting them back
into the barrage for cultural consideration. A sometimes nasty (but wholly
appropriate) response to a society in decline and denial."
Here is an interesting case: Dennis Erlich vs. the Church of Scientology. Erlich was arrested for disseminating copyrighted material of the Chruch of Scientology on
alt.religion.scientology, an
internet newgroup. The BBC,
The Net, This Week ran a story and a Webpage filled with information and the Chruch of Scientology began to respond by way of different media, especially the WWW. See what you can find out about the history and status of this case. Here's a beginning search. What other terms can you use to research this case?
(For additional information on copyright issues, see Appendix A, CyberReader2.)
Here are some additional on-line networks that should help with the readings in this chapter:
Neil Postman: For a speech given to the German Informatics Society, 11 Oct 90, Stuttgart, entitled (somewhat similar to a book of his, Amusing Ourselves to Death) "Informing Ourselves to Death.
William Gibson. Here you will find a copy of Agrippa decoded. Be careful of downloading a copy because you might download the virus along with the story/poem! ;-) Here's a copy of the parody.
Bruce Sterling, The Dead Media Project. Sterling has proposed that we collect, catalog, and write histories of all the dead media. Here's a Dead Media Project support page. (See below: The Media History Project.)
The Media History Project. Complements Sterling's Dead Media Project.
About Mirrorshades Conference on the WELL, hosted in part by Sterling.
A Grab Bag of Authors at The "Being Digital" Cyberdock. Take the link "Cyberdock" and then scroll or point down to:
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WHAT DO OTHER AUTHORS SAY ABOUT LIVING, READING, WRITING, AND WORKING IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE?
* Sven Birkerts: The Gutenberg Elegies - The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (fragments)
* Kurt Johmann: The Computer Inside You
* William J. Mitchell: City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn
* Howard Rheingold's Home Page
* Clifford Stoll: Silicon Snake Oil - Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (fragments)
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Once again, the Search Engines:
HotBot || AltaVista || Yahoo ||
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Introduction to Researching
