|
|
| |
| |
Somnio, ergo sum
Donald Challenger
Navigating this webtext
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Somnio, ergo sum is a simple webtext that may be read in several ways. It is composed of three interrelated but independent threads -- Somnio, Ergo, and Sum -- each of which may be either used as a starting point for a hypertextual reading or followed as a discrete and conventional linear argument:
- Somnio explores a series of dreams the 23-year-old Descartes had on the night of Nov. 10, 1619, dreams that he first characterized despairingly as the work of the "Demon" but later celebrated as providing "the foundation of the wonderful science" -- his general theory of method. This thread focuses on the unusual history of the dreams and their documentation: disappearances and reappearances, appropriations and revisions that themselves constitute a kind of proto-hypertext, a cultural reading of the dreams.
- Ergo is for Descartes the foundational hinge between being and knowing. As such, it might be thought of as an originary metaphor for linking mechanisms between texts or verbal events, and this thread of the web asks what ergo reveals, and hides, about the syntax of the link.
- Sum is an attempt to pursue, perhaps naively, what the avatars of hypertext, Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush, imagined as the interdisciplinary conversation made possible by hypertext.
Suggestions for reading Somnio, ergo sum:
- Links within the text of most nodes will allow you to move among the three threads of the web to construct an individual reading.
- Next on the Options navigation bar to the left will advance you to the next node in a linear reading of each of the threads. Back will return you to the previous node. If you are not reading the text in linear fashion, use the Back button on your browser to return to the last node you accessed.
- The second group of five options allows you to move elsewhere within the thread and to the common nodes shared by all three threads. Introduction, Navigation, and Endnotes are common nodes. Amplification and Arcs are thread-specific nodes.
- Amplification nodes provide further depth, commentary or sourcing. Use the Back button on your browser if you wish to return to the thread.
- Arcs are nodes presenting leaps, associations, subterranean connections -- Ulmer's conductive logic at work in a hypertext environment. Again, use the Back button on your browser if you wish to return to the thread.
- You can orient yourself at any point in the web by color; the thread in which you are situated will be in red in the title at the top of the screen.
Click on Somnio, Ergo, or Sum to begin an individual thread.
|
|
|
|
| |
"The ideal of all natural science is a system of propositions so general, so clear, so comprehensive, connected with each other by logical links so unambiguous and direct, that the result resembles as closely as possible a deductive system, where one can travel along wholly reliable routes from any point on the system to any other." Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
