FYIFrance: e-text and e-publishing -- a new, French, model? (Part 2/2)

(A continuation of the description of a new French e - text /
publishing project of the Centre Pompidou, with an interestingly -
French and perhaps new orientation, to be found online at
http://www.cnac-gp.fr .)


"2. Editorial hypotheses: a sketch of policies which might guide the
project"

"Why should the new technologies of thought, of communication, and of
history be reserved exclusively to the fields of business, of war, of
money, or of "hard" sciences, particularly as so many seem pleased to
expostulate (often demagogically, it is true) that education and
culture will constitute the grand challenges of the next century?"

	"+ Periodicals"

		"o Reviews and exhibition catalogs: the question of
		periodicity"

"One wonders about the decline of journals and the success of exhibition
catalogs. This latter success also involves a decline in a certain form
of faithfulness, found in the periodicity of a journal as a mandate of a
particular school of thought... (now) culture has been seized by the
phenomenon of the unique event, which arrives at a given moment, a
reference point in time, in a society which lacks points of reference
and in which it is difficult to record cultural events in anything
representing historical continuity... Exhibitions exist which are true
events. Why not also events of thought, which will not be either books,
or exhibitions, but an occurrence of collective intelligence in the
service of a theme, of a problem, of a goal, of some cause which might
constitute a true cultural event?"

Note: Christo has wrapped several things in Paris recently -- his art
projects often take years, and the event of producing them always is at
least as significant, to him and to those participating (he and they
say), as is any finished product, be it a wrapped bridge or a
scattering of giant parasols.

		"o An annual event"

"The Centre Pompidou offers the intellectual experimentation necessary
for a production of this nature, all the resources which one could hope
for:  coordination with exhibitions, workshops which could be sites for
both experimentation and for the production of intellectual objects to
appear later (the journal becomes a process)..."

	"+ Editorial principles"

"We wish to produce a flexible tool, offering different levels of use,
different levels of the treatment of knowledge as functions of each
specific objective, of each theme or problem confronted, of the
evolution of the level of information equipment of the users: a tool
which can at the same time go beyond the choice between users who are
among a 'target' group and 'the rest'.  A tool, combining unity and
diversity, and sufficiently developed to accommodate a certain
variability in the user's choice of media."

"2.2.1 A variable approach"

"Journals... There are more and more of them, but they concern less and
less.  Their existence is not possible without subsidies, and they
appear in extremely specialized fields... The perspective of hyper -
specialization, or that of a generalist approach which can only treat a
thing superficially within its restrained space, this journal will
oppose... Not the partisan overview of a question, viewed by its
supposedly - best specialists, but a user's space enriched and opened
to new areas, unanticipated even by those in the field, bringing to the
scene a very large number of points of view on a given theme, and
adding to the theme diverse levels of competency... A space in which
the user her/himself can construct her/his own singular view, a view
reflecting only one of the facets of the kaleidoscope... "

		"o A variable approach to texts and to media"

"One might imagine an object both dense and pliable... which mixes
luxury with modesty, richness or content density with lightness..."

"2.2.3 Variable levels of use: hypertext as a response to the
philosophy of the project"

"A place for perspective, for "what - if" scenarios in unanticipated
directions, or directions a priori different from the usual...
Hypertext: non - linearity...  non - hierarchy... connectivity...
variability... these qualities, which define hypertext and distinguish
it from the book, also define the basic idea of the undertaking which
we propose... in hypertext, the page becomes the physical place of a
dialog between the text and the reader, as was the medieval codex which
opened its margins to the writing of the reader... One must imagine,
finally, a publication in part made by the users themselves..."

		"o Of doors and windows"

"_Tr@verses_ thus may be thought of as a door through which one only
must pass, to gain access to a room containing another or several other
doors. The model of journals has been that of the window, lands of
knowledge perceived and admired from the outside through the authority
of the authors of which they are composed or of a handful of
specialists (the editorial committee). We are concerned here to make
doors which the user, if s/he desires, may open, to enter new spaces,
such that that user's presence and manner of being in the successive
rooms of the knowledge space modify the structure of the whole,
creating a profound renewal in the relations between writing and
reading...  We must, in sum, for each of the goals which the journal
proposes, think of a tool, a product, a collection of same which makes
reference, and to which the user may in fact refer, without any
limitation other than her or his curiosity, inclination, or personal
professional needs."


Such is this French e - text / publication program: a project "to be
followed", as the French themselves say. The description is worth
reading in full in the French:  it includes references to Pierre Le'vy,
Ponge, Michelet, Guattari, Roubaud, Calvino, Ovid, Lucretius, Vale'ry,
Leibniz, Luccarella, Lebrave, Stendhal, Montesquieu, and Ted Nelson,
among others -- the French educational system is a remarkable thing.

If an American longs for the details -- the devil being in the details
-- much of what is being proposed here appears at least to evoke known
techniques: there are smatterings here of WorldWideWeb and hypertext,
and Mosaic browsers and multimedia links and MUDs and MOOs and Internet
Relay Chat, all of these well - known now in France -- they are
speaking of, at least, a yearly printed version and a cdrom, although
one suspects that there will be more -- anyone having a hard time
envisaging multitudes of simultaneous users of a multimedia text, and
discussing and arguing and indeed fighting over it, need think now only
of Usenet, or of the better - disciplined PACS-L e - conference with
its 9000+ users in 65+ countries, to get the general possible idea.

An American has to compare this French approach with the one s/he knows
so well from home. In the US, trial - and - error leads to declarations
of principle; in France, lofty declarations are the necessary prelude
to trial - and - error. The approaches are different. The US perhaps
has been rich enough to afford the one, while France has found it
necessary -- not so much through poverty perhaps as through long,
bitter, political experience -- to search first for the apparent
clarity of the other. At least the French present all the above to the
world in advance, as they did their plans for their new giant library,
and the presentation in this case is available online in German,
English, Spanish and Italian: that sells better "overseas" than
presentations made only in "american" ASCII.

(Umberto Eco has characterized DOS as "Protestant, or even Calvinistic.
It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal
decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics...", while he calls the
Macintosh computer, "Catholic... cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it
tells the faithful how they must proceed... via simple formulae and
sumptuous icons": perhaps the Franco - American differences noted here
are nothing more. If so, it is salutary -- perhaps humbling -- to
realize that some very old differences ultimately still rule the
development of some of these very new techniques.)

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FYIFrance e - newsletter        ISSN 1071 - 5916
 
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