Back to top: Giorgio Buccellati 2017
Digital discourse
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a special "story line" |
There is a special way in which disparate data are appropriated, automatically and not, into the system and integrated into a meaningful new whole. We may consider this process a digital discourse. Through a series of operations that are in large measure automated, it produces a construct that organizes data in the form of an argument. Its formal characteristics are those of a narrative that serves the same purpose as the traditional one, but with a “story line” that is construed differently – a “digital text.”
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| discourses |
Fragmentation is so characteristic of a digital text that it is valid to ask whether we can properly speak of “discourse” (see Tilley 1990). I give a positive answer, although it may be more appropriate to speak of “discourses” in the plural. Arguments are proposed and followed in a text mode, with hyperlinks providing the equivalent of traditional crossreferences, footnotes or figures. But arguments can be constructed with a maximum of flexibility, by following at will a myriad different threads that are offered not at random but as part of the larger overall discourse.
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| advantages |
The great advantage of such an open-ended structure is the speed with which one can follow an unlimited quantity of paths that link with each other the most varied observations. In so doing, randomness can become purposeful.
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| disadvantages |
One must, however, caution against the disadvantages. A digital discourse can reduce to a minimum the time for reflection and the ability to
absorb both arguments and data. Also, the perception of the whole is quite different between a digital and a printed text, and so are the modalities of use. Therefore one may easily lose track of the broader import and one may as a result drown in details. In that case, randomness may generate a purposeless daydreaming. Thus it may be useful to encourage the notion that one should in fact “read” and “study,” not just “surf,” a digital text (on cognitive implications of multimedia learning, see Mayer 2005)
The [QUOTATION TO BE COMPLETED - ZI823 mDP] |
| p. 190 |
narrative
discourse
text |
The term “digital narrative” refers to the nexus among the components of the discourse, or the style whereby an argument is being pursued in explicitly digital terms (see also literary digital narrative, Ryan 2002).
The term “digital discourse” refers to the overall frame within which an argument unfolds, or the span that is seen as constituting a structural whole.
The term “digital text” refers to the specific embodiment in which discourse and narrative take shape, a self-contained structural whole such as a full website, or a digital book or monograph contained within it (see Chapter 12)..
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| p. 215-16 |
"One long argument" |
“As this whole volume is one long argument, it may be convenient to the reader to have the leading facts and inferences briefly recapitulated” – thus reads the first sentence of the last (15th) chapter of The Origin of Species (Darwin 1861: 492). The same words are repeated at the end of Darwin’s Autobiography: “The Origin of Species is one long argument from the beginning to the end” (Darwin 1958: 140; note also the title of Mayr 1991).
Does any author feel this way in constructing a website? Do readers expect it? Not as a rule, it would seem. We do not expect a website to unfold as [page 216] a major single argument, nor do we typically plan on developing an argument while “writing” a website. There does not seem to be a particular concern to achieve a logical concatenation among the parts so that, through the progression of the conceptual flow, the underlying secret kinship might emerge “from the beginning to the end,” as Darwin would have it. There seems to be no room for pride in constructing “one long argument” (see also Carr 2008).
There is, of course, a coherence of subject matter and a sense of harmony in the display: in this sense, the compositional unity of a website is entrusted essentially to its design, understood primarily as an aesthetic dimension. Conceptually, a website may remain primarily a repository, a clearing house for elements that remain often only extrinsically related to each other. If instead of an aggregate resulting from accumulation we wish to achieve an organic whole, an effective overarching frame within which the arguments unfold, we must think of it in terms of a digital discourse. What are the principles that can make such a conceptual unity possible? This is the topic of this section, where I will seek to describe a digital text (a website) in terms of discourse analysis as found in linguistics. I will then look at the impact this has on perception (12.5) and at the specific mechanisms through which these principles may be applied (12.6).
We must first consider briefly the relationship between a digital discourse seen as a “long argument” and the nature of a simple digital argument as discussed earlier (11.3). In both instances we look at sequentiality, but from a different point of view. When talking about an argument as such, we look from within at the dynamics through which data and inferences are ordered sequentially: what is the nature of the possible linkages among them? Our focus is then on sequentiality in act, on the consequentiality of the steps. When talking instead about a digital discourse (the long argument), we look from without at the sequence as a selfcontained span, something that derives its coherence from the nature of the trajectory that has a given starting point and an ending.
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