Harpold 2009

Harpold, Terry. Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

"A Future Device for Individual Use"

Ted Nelson's definition of hypertext (15) -- "hypertext is, then, first a practice of composition: hypertexts comprise other textual objects" (15/1.03)

"In Nelson's initial formula, hypertext begins by being spread over the gamut of prior and possible textual practices as a boundary phenomenon: joined to and depending on existing habits of writing and reading -- especially those derived from print and marked by its discontents -- and reaching beyond them, into conjectural habits of a new technical regime, more fluid, more varied, and more extensive than its precursors." (16/1.04)

hypertext often defined negatively against print ("Hypertext is a kind of text inconveniently realized in print." (17/1.06)) but readerly practices differ (17/1.07)

Memex -- close reading of its illustration of readerly practices, its connection to traditions of Wunderkammer, automata, Antonello da Messina's painting of Jerome, etc. -- "new kind of mental furniture" (28/1.26)

bijection: "we might have anticipated this orientation of the archive -- toward, if not irreversibly an interior, then toward, somewhat irreversibly, a medial projection that implies and inside and an outside." (29/1.28)

connection between war machines and Bush's archival devices

"It is in this context that the real basis of the archive, despite its repression in the figure of seamless conversion, returns from repression." (33/1.36)

inside/outside in the archive (34-4/1.38) -- interiority of the Memex desk, exteriority of its trails leading outward (35-6/1.40-1)

Memex II -- a more "intimate" device; "supplementation has crossed into prosthesis" (40/1.50)

• trail and image are "functually homologous, each considered in its own right and sustained according to closely related economies of manipulation and transmission" (42/1.53)

"the later Memexes are in this respect less models for a new kind of mental furniture than tropes -- for memory, for textual fields, for ill-defined points of contact between them, in the shape of furniture." (41)

Historiations: Xanadu and Other Recollection Machines

Ted Nelson, Xanadu -- both temporal and differential (48/2.07)

"Across this site of bijection, Xanadu orients into clusters or knots otherwise dispersed units of text, each with a history that pertains to it and the ensembles to which it may have belonged or may yet belong. Moreover, the user interface has to model the ways in which the reader finds herself carried forward by effects of those histories, generating -- and, equally significant, imagining -- new ensembles on the basis of new juxtapositions of elements of the reading surface." (49/2.09)

• how to do this without it devolving into "a mere series of snapshots of document states?" (49/2.09)

reading of Lacan's revision of Saussure's classic diagram of signifier/signified (49/2.10-51/2.13)

Lacan: signifier as polyphonic, chained (53/2.18)

"Each moment of the reading encounter is the inconsistent aggregate of other moments, stimulated -- consciously and unconsciously -- by marks and patterns of marks (and relations of marks too inchoate and variable to be qualified as 'patterns') that evoke others and thus generate meanings that are specific to the encounter. I propose to characterize these operations, which are bound to, and capable of anticipating and generating new responses to, visual-textual traits of the reading surface, by the term historiation." (56/2.24)

• historiated initials, medieval illuminated manuscripts, marking divisions and intertexts

Nelson, TextFace (58/2.30-61/2.37)

memory palaces (63/2.41-65/2.45)

"The product of memory as a media technic is not, then, the docuverse as it is now, but that which could be recollected of it in the future: the future anterior of what it will have been, given that which it is in the process of becoming. The threads of the tangle cannot be divided neatly; they are too many; you could not distinguish them all, or follow all their divagations -- isolating them in this way would distort them." (70/2.55)

"So you need a program that tracks what matters -- out of all of it, for all of it matters to what matters -- and a suitable container in which to put it, like an expanding desk or a unlimited store on the back end. And: a procedure to recollect it all, in case something should happen to the container. Thus is the text, in the broadest possible sense of that term -- the 'text-archive-object,' always-already a textbase (only a set-theoretic mathematics seems applicable here) -- pinned to the scene of historiation." (70/2.55)