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Why a theory about publishing?
Why include a section about digital publishing in a discussion dealing with theory? The reason lies in the nature of the website understood as a digital book. This is a concept that has not been properly recognized, much less implemented. So it needs to be articulated. I have discussed this in a number of publications and presentations, and at some length in the Cybernetica Mesopotamica website dedicated to the wider project within which the UGR fits.
Here I will review the argument in function of how it applies to the UGR.
Back to top: Introduction
a. Principles
The core of the argument is in what I call digital discourse: here I will describe t briefly, in order to bring out the epistemic prerogative of the UGR. I will develop the concept fully in a separate website, where one will find a full discussion of the website as a new epistemic entity.
The implementation of the digital discourse rests on a very specfic feature of the digital environment, to which I refer with the term “interplanarity“: again, I will discuss it here in ternms of how it applies to the UGR.
As a premise to the concept of interplanarity, I will deal with the various types of linearity that are presupposed, and I will then address briefly the issue of artificial intelligence.
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b. Uses
A browser edition is a complex epistemic system which requires, in order to be properly used, a new set of mental templates.
This section deals with system design from a theoretical point of view, aiming to show what these mental templates ought to be. The actual implementation will be presented below.
We first deal with the physiognomy of a digital book: what is its epistemic dimension as distinct from a standard website?
Then we look at what new mental attitudes are requires for reading and writing su h a new system for conveying knowledge.
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Web-based and disk-based editions
Browsers are typically associated with “web”-“sites”: the “site” is the location on the worldwide web where one can access the knowledge content that is stored there.
In principle, however, a browser edition is not limited to the worldwide web. Conceptually, a digital book is a browser edition, and as such it can be disk-based. For a large system like the UGR, where many digital books are interconnected, it is in fact next to impossible to compress all the data with the interconnected links on a systame that is not connected to the worldwide web.
publications for two main reasons. The first is that on disk we can offer high resolution images, which would inordinately slow down normal web use. The second is that a disk publication provides
Back to top: Introduction