Three men in the session I watched before the Ph.D panel: Thomas A. Porter, Nitzan Ben-Shaul and Patrick Crogan.
Porter introduced an alternative or an expansion of Espen Aarseth's typologies, as he had found them hard to apply to the kind of analysis they were intended for. He suggested some new terms: "These individual web pages are scriptons, units of presented script, and the larger series of web pages can be discussed as authorial, editorial or otherwise determined content spaces, depending upon the perspective from which one wishes to explore the system." There is a distinct need for terms for analyzing computer mediated texts, as I have argued elsewhere - although much less elegantly.
Ben-Shaul out of Tel Aviv writes on cognitive psychology analyzing the cinema, but in this panel he writes on human perception. The main problem is: why can't we focus on the hypertext? Answer - or hypothesis - is that in general people cannot deal with the requiered split attention. Interaction and the split attention between input and activity leads to a different writing mode with less identification, more incoherence and non-closure.
Patrick Crogan went immediately into the discussion with Espen's terms aporia and epiphani in first-person shooters, and as Espen was hosting the session, the long-and-complicated word count got high, and the mood even before the first round. The energetic presentation was however not easy to summarize, so I guess the best thing to do is to wait until the paper is published, and then download! The papers is somewhat more comprehensive.
Posted by at May 22, 2003 02:35 PM