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During a Spring 2015 Intro to Digital Humanities course with Dr. Katherine Pandora, we explored the illusory meanings of authority, publicity, and property in the context of the digital age with the assistance, and sometimes the insistence, of David Weinberger's "Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room." We articulated our thoughts on these issues in the form of a series of blogpost responses to various portions of Weinberger's text. The blogpost itself is a medium that allows the amateur author to transcend the barriers of traditional publishing modes, while simultaneously allowing the reader the eschew the burden of responsibility required to read a monograph text. While a single blogpost entry on a topic my save the reader from this burden, several dozen such blogposts do not. It was my hope for this project, then, to enable the audience to consume our class responses, to take a peek into the world of digital scholarship, without such an enormous calorie-expenditure.
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I attempted to save those calories by taking the original blogpost material, chopping it into its constituent components along topical lines (represented by the different hexagonal sections of the prezi), and sifting the pieces according to pertinence, removing redundancies. The jigsawed components can thus be viewed topically, by zooming. The prezi as a medium renders this possible. Traditional presentation forms constrict consumption to rigid linear progressions. The prezi, as such, allows for any such symbolic architecture as the author can muster creatively: in this case a honeycomb, which can be read linearly, by following the topics radially around the center, ending at the bibliography, or can be viewed in any order the reader desires. The zoom feature allows the reader to consume the text impressionistically at a glance, more closely by topic, or microscopically, excerpt by excerpt. The reader can consume the whole text, just the topic of most interest or applicability, or none of the text by quickly previewing all its available contents and finding them wanting.
As for the structural arrangement of the excerpts themselves, they represent a knowledge network in the spirit of Weinberger's intellectual interests. Rather than being arranged chronologically, or grouped by author, they have been dissected and spliced according to their intellectual proximity to one another, represented by their hexagonal containers, and are related to one another by the proximal relationships of different hexagons in the honeycomb, as well as through the unifying theme represented by the central, titular, hexagon. The honeycomb is thus a geometric representation of a network, with nodes at the excerpts, and the lines rendered invisible but readily infer-able.
During a Spring 2015 Intro to Digital Humanities course with Dr. Katherine Pandora, we explored the illusory meanings of authority, publicity, and property in the context of the digital age with the assistance, and sometimes the insistence, of David Weinberger's "Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room." We articulated our thoughts on these issues in the form of a series of blogpost responses to various portions of Weinberger's text. The blogpost itself is a medium that allows the amateur author to transcend the barriers of traditional publishing modes, while simultaneously allowing the reader the eschew the burden of responsibility required to read a monograph text. While a single blogpost entry on a topic my save the reader from this burden, several dozen such blogposts do not. It was my hope for this project, then, to enable the audience to consume our class responses, to take a peek into the world of digital scholarship, without such an enormous calorie-expenditure.
form
I attempted to save those calories by taking the original blogpost material, chopping it into its constituent components along topical lines (represented by the different hexagonal sections of the prezi), and sifting the pieces according to pertinence, removing redundancies. The jigsawed components can thus be viewed topically, by zooming. The prezi as a medium renders this possible. Traditional presentation forms constrict consumption to rigid linear progressions. The prezi, as such, allows for any such symbolic architecture as the author can muster creatively: in this case a honeycomb, which can be read linearly, by following the topics radially around the center, ending at the bibliography, or can be viewed in any order the reader desires. The zoom feature allows the reader to consume the text impressionistically at a glance, more closely by topic, or microscopically, excerpt by excerpt. The reader can consume the whole text, just the topic of most interest or applicability, or none of the text by quickly previewing all its available contents and finding them wanting.
As for the structural arrangement of the excerpts themselves, they represent a knowledge network in the spirit of Weinberger's intellectual interests. Rather than being arranged chronologically, or grouped by author, they have been dissected and spliced according to their intellectual proximity to one another, represented by their hexagonal containers, and are related to one another by the proximal relationships of different hexagons in the honeycomb, as well as through the unifying theme represented by the central, titular, hexagon. The honeycomb is thus a geometric representation of a network, with nodes at the excerpts, and the lines rendered invisible but readily infer-able.