Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Interface Culture


Very nice notes tonight on interface and culture. Interface is a pretty interesting concept that became especially obvious relative to texts only after it was applied to the world of electronic texts and the windows into them. (K. Hayles has made this point repeatedly: the materiality of one kind of text helps us understand the materiality of another.)

For some (short) additional discussion of this, see the link below.

For additional discussion (if you *really* like interface), see Anne Wysocki and J. Jasken in the 2004 anniversary issue of Computers and Composition. Good news: you can get to it online in the library.

Not least, if you want to see an interesting combination of interface culture and convergence culture, take a look at the MIT Press website where Hayles' Writing Machines is available. You'll see that you can purchase a "web supplement," which is identified as an "extension of the book": "the Web Supplement includes the lexicon linkmap, scholarly apparatus, and offers alternative mappings of the book's conceptual terrain with functionalities unavailable in print." For free, you also can view a text they call a "webtake," which is a Flash-based commentary on the limits of the book as a form. Here is the link:

http://http//mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/mediawork_about.html

http://http//webstyleguide.com/interface/web-conventional.html

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