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Websites: an intellectual model
The 4Banks cluster implements the fundamental philosophy that underlies the notion of a scholarly website, to be developed in detail in a dedicated website, d-Discourse.net. I argue for the validity of a website that develops a full fledged “long argument,” with the same intent and method that characterize an argument presented in a book or article.
The core principle of this approach is that a website ought to be based on a clear sense of structure that defines it as a recognizable whole. The specific way in which this can be implemented is twofold:
- authors must reclaim their responsibility to construct a proper digital discourse which interlaces parallel planes within the framework of a given website or multiple websites, and
- readers must also reclaim their responsiblity to study a website as they would a book or an article, but with a new alertness to the interplanar dimension.
This understanding of digital publishing is at variance with current views about the impact of digitality on cognitive development. I argue that a fully committed structural approach to website writing and reading allows us to develop a powerful dimension of digital thought and thus to reach for an invigorating new brand of digital humanism (Buccellati G 2024 Frammenti).
Such humanistic view of digitality will in turn have an impact on the social and even the exact sciences, showing how awareness of the whole is indispensable for a proper assessment of the fragments into which the whole can be broken down.
Back to top: The website as an epistemic system
Degrees of digitality
The term “digital” is ubiquitous in covering a number of alternatives. The widest range includes diverse configurations that appear on a device, whether a wrist watch that displays numbers instead of rotating hands, a thermometer that also displays numbers instead of a mercury tube, a word processor that displays words on a screen, a camera that displays an image as the resolution of a number of pixels. In essence, this refers to the same process, whereby binary digits (“bits”) indicate the presence or absence of a given value, assembling them accordingly into higher level configurations.
A website offers a special application of digitality. What appeals mostly is the dynamics it makes possible: there are multiple planes that can be instantly accessed, whether on the same website or on different websites. There thus develops a non-linear sequence, which builds on jump-off points (“hyperlinks”), and allows an extremely rapid and functional access to information, linking and making accessible on the fly elements which have not been conceived as belonging together. This is what I call “digital discourse“.
Back to top: The website as an epistemic system
An epistemic system
Any website is an epitemic system in the sense that it conveys knowledge. What I aim for, with an interplanar website understood as digital discourse, is a special kind of epistemic system, one that makes full use of the potential of digitality and requires a reconfiguration of our mindsets. I briefly describe this in the next section.
Back to top: The website as an epistemic system