Back to top: Digital discourse
The concept
Fragmentation is so characteristic of a standard website that it is valid to ask whether we can speak, in that case, of “discourse.” But this is the very point I am making: we may properly speak of “discourse,” or better of “discourses,” in the plural – provided we make full use of the digital potential at our disposal.
Arguments are proposed and followed in a discursive mode, with hyperlinks providing the equivalent of traditional crossreferences, footnotes or figures. But arguments can be constructed by following one’s own thread through the data.
Thus a text published as a browser edition includes, in its most minute detail, every single observation ever recorded, while provideing at thes same time a frame that overarches the detail.
The Urkesh Global Record is presented in the form of a “browser edition.” Its main distinguishing feature is the ability to break down the elements of the discourse into its most minute segments, which are individually composed, while retaining at the same time a rigorous sense of structure for the whole within which the segments make sense.
It is the age old interaction between analysis and sythesis, but heightened by the immensely greater power of the electronic tool now at our disposal. More than in most cases, the technique truly impacts on method by eliciting new habits and, indeed, new mental templates.
Back to top: Digital discourse