Exploring Hegirascope Assignment

The Hegirascope is a collection of a couple hundred lexia that are linked between one another in many different ways.  For each lexia (page), there are four links that accompany it.  Each of these links link to another different lexia than one you’ve seen before — most likely.  I stumbled upon three lexias that were able to be linked in a triangle.  Just by randomly clicking one of the four given links on each lexia, after three pages, I was able to get back to the one I started at. 

The first lexia that I have decided to start with is the one titled, “Catalog of Dreams #401.”  I think that the author of this particular lexia is trying to illustrate a scene for us as the readers.  The author describes the scenery of what is being presented by saying, “Here mesas, cacti, clouds, krazy hanging rocks are all left blank. There is just this rock which is red.”  With the description the author gave, I picture in my head a dessert-type setting, except without any color — other than this red rock.  The next paragraph then mentions that the rock isn’t only red, it is, “ruby, copper, gold, magenta, molasses, rust, ochre, burnt sienna, black and white and red.”  Besides the black and white, the other colors are shades or tints of red — a color that can be closely associated with the dessert.  A sunsent amidst the dessert is what I picture when I read this lexia.

From this lexia I clicked on a link called “rock.”  The link took me to a lexia called “Education.”  Education presents itself through the first person style of writing.  It is about — I’m assuming what is a young man of about my age — talking about his educational experiences so far in his life.  It takes place back in 1953 when he/she went to Esther Williams College to persue an adjutants degree.  An adjutent is defined as a helper; it seems to be a pretty strange thing to major in.  The narrator talks about how he met Lord Perfidious and they would drink tea and share atomic secrets.  Taken literally, considering the era, they could have been sharing real secrets about maybe what they knew of atomic weapons.  When thinking about how this links to the previous lexia — Catalog of Dreams #401 — I first noticed the opening line of Education where it states, “In 1953, at the age of three paving stones and a large piece of quartzite…”  The obvious mention of paving stones and quartzite links to the red rock mentioned in the previous lexia.  After thinking about this a little more in depth, however, I considered the colors mentioned in the Catalog of Dreams #401 — ruby, copper, gold, magenta, molasses, rust, ochre, burnt sienna … and red — and thought of those as colors of destruction, perhaps at the hands of an atomic bomb?  Also, haven’t nuclear testings taken place in the dessert?

As I have gone through these lexias, I tried to click on the link that seemed to be what the author was talking about in that certain lexia.  After the Education lexia, I clicked on the link called “schooling.”  This took me to a lexia titled “Your Agent Called.”  This one is written in what seems to be the second-person narrative.  If I were to guess at what this is about — as I said, they all are rather obscure — I would suggest the stock market.  The narrator mentions that a financial fugitive acquired the Hannah-Barbera cartoon library for ¥800 trillion.  At the end of this lexia, the narrator suggests that one should buy Dotsex at ¥1,400 because research — which you are now privvy to — has proven that sexual stimulation will cure Alzheimer’s in some patients.  After reading through this one a few times and studying it, I still find it difficult to find a concrete link between the two.  As I mentioned above, an Adjutant is a helper, or an aid — like a secretary.  You can argue here that the link between the two is that scientific research is being conducted year-round at the price of hundreds of millions of dollars to help and aid those who are ill.  This third lexia talks about the cure of Alzheimer’s as sexual stimulation and that it is a proven cure for those who suffer.

The word Hegira refers to a flight to a more hospitable place.  The word scope insights the act of narrowing down a search or focusing tightly on something.  So hegirascope to me means the act of deeply looking at something with the intent of the main focus getting better or becoming what you want it to become.  This relates to these excerpts from the lexias because these lexias can be taken almost any way you want.  They can be molded down into whatever the reader thinks — to an extent of course.  Just through some critical thinking, I was able to come up with reasons why I thought these three lexias linked together.  There is no definite ending or sense of closure here.  An interpretive strategy that can be applied to this is the text as a kaleidoscope strategy.  The kaleidoscope is constantly changing with any iota of change.  In a way, this is like the Calvino novel because you can pretty much interpret your own ending for all ten of those stories as well as the three lexias here.        

Exploring Hegirascope Assignment

  1. Continue exploring Hegirascope
  2. Pick any series of three linked pages
  3. What are these fragments about? What do they add up to?
  4. Analyze the lexia themselves, the “texture” of the link choices between them, the actual links, how the lexia relate to each other, how the lexia relate to the whole of Hegirascope and its overall meaning
  5. Post a 500-word critical "reading" or interpretation of Hegirascope to the blog (this does not replace the weekly reading response); be sure to include in your post links to the specific pages which you write about

Cuts

The text material in J. Yellow Douglas’ Gaps, Maps, and Perceptions: What Hypertext Readers (don’t) do, points out that the events witness as film is just a series of cuts.  That the cuts present a story that the viewer’s mine set the stage for what it perceives. 

The viewer’s perception fills in the gutters that align and form the story as in the cuts and reformatting of text in Bustdown the Door, Calvino’s novel, and Hejirascope.  The series of cuts lead the mind to see elements that may or may not be present.  Understanding Comics set the series of cuts in a boarder while your brain bridges the material’s gutters with your own precepts. 

I noticed that my mind began to form perception when I was viewing Hejirascope.  Douglas points out that human perception have biases toward “seeing causality and intention even where these qualities may not exit.  Although, hypertext may seem new, its fundamental attributes as related to perception was study over 20 years ago in Belgium.  The Belgium study observed subject who watched animated images all conclude that they saw causation connected to the movement of the images. 

Seeing connections in hypertext, Douglas Hofstadter suggests, “is perhaps the single definitive characteristic of intelligent behavior."

Interpretive Skills

J. Douglas discusses interpretive skills throughout Gaps, Maps, and Perception: What Hypertext Readers Don’t Do.  On page 3 of the article, Douglas mentions that nearly half the time we spend at the movies is, in fact, spent in the blackness between frames and how the human eye and brain have learned to form fluid, tangible reproductions.  He points out that interpretive skills have been around as long as humans have existed living in the wilderness which were essential for survival in a highly competive natural environment.

I immediately made the connection between hypertext and cinema filling in the gaps, then forming a mental map, which shapes the perception.  Then my mind wandered and I thought of all the other was humans have learned to use interpretive skills outside of just reading or watching film.  These skills can be used to form a hypothesis about what will happen next, just like any pattern in a real life scenario.  The more you drive to shopping malls and look for parking, you use interpretive skills to judge what kind of drivers will pull out without looking or the signs of who is coming and leaving.  This applies to hypertext in this aspect: the more you "surf" the net or read hypertexts, your understanding of what to focus on increases and your judgement is sharpened as a result.  Just as in baseball, you learn when to look for the fastball, say a 3-0 count, and when to expect the breaking ball, a 1-2 count. 

Weekly Response

The Hejirascope reminded me of a lot of things.  At first because of the way the stories just seemed to end, it reminded me a lot of Italo Calvino’s On A Winter’s Night a Traveler.  After reading for a little bit longer, I then started to compare it to the Create Your Own Adventure books.  For obvious reasons, you have a choice on which link out of the four to click on.  There were two ways which I found seperated this exercise from a CYOA story.  The first is that the stories typically don’t match up.  I think I did click on one link that went to what seemed like an extension of the previous link.  Another way that they are seperate is that there seems to be a time limit.  You are given a certain amount of time to read each blurb that comes up, and then to choose a link or destination.  Thanks to the ‘back’ button, however, it is up to you whether or not time is a factor.  The first time I ran through it, I hit the back button every time it cut me off.  After about 10 minutes of this, I decided to just go with the flow and see where it takes me.  Just as if I chose my own destinations, the resulting pages that came up were just as random as the ones that preceeded them.  At times though, some of the blurbs did match up — only not in succession.  An example of this are the stories of Mr. Perlmutter.  In a matter of about 5 straight minutes, I read about three or four blurbs on him, but at very random times.  It seemed like you’d get the end of his story in one blurb, and then the beginning of his story in another.  In a way, it did sort of tie things together.  Maybe I just read too much into though. 

I couldn’t help but notice the aesthetics of the site itself.  Due to the color combinations of the text and the background, it was very easy to read the text.  However, I think that because almost every successive page presented a different look to it — sometimes a radical change, not a sublte one — it seemed to be more of a distraction than anything to me.  I’m not the quickest reader, so the changes threw me off and sort of frustrated me at the same time.  This activity did relate to the Bush piece on how technology is changing and has the ability to advance.  The internet is a new media that has given this Hejirascope the chance for being.  Without the Internet, it may not have the same affect, say if it were presented to a person through note/flash cards or something like that.  The immediacy of it is what makes it important.  The ability of the media and technology to keep on throwing the new blurbs out on a timeline, for example, is what makes this activity effective.   

Hitcher Guide to the Galaxy Interactive Game

Out of all the interactive game we have played so far, I found Hitch Hiker guide to the Galaxy the most user friendly.  The graphic help in determining what objects are in the room and where I am at a certain point.  The hints are great also, because some of them does guide you to the next step but they do not completely give the answers away unless we really want it.  I like how the hints are given in progression so that still leave me the freedom to try things on my own until I am really stuck and need to refer back to them again.  The hints are also quite humorous as well.  For example, I am trying to obtain the bable fish and that attempt got me into a big mess.  I still haven’t obtain my bable fish and was then kicked off to another space ship.   I’ve been playing this for hours and thinking that I should go do my homework and realized that this is part of my homework.  One thing about this game I realized is that I really have to be persistent at things.  Certain parts required me to do the same command over and over again.  Reading the series on the Hitch hiker Guide to the Galaxy and playing the interactive game are two different experience.  Playing the game I am the one making the decisions to examine things and find out what works and where to go.  The terminology of the game and the book are similar such as the characters names, the bable fish and the setting, however the game requires more problem solving skills and of course interaction on my part to advance the narrative.

hey all!!!! okay about the comic book

hey all!!!! okay about the comic book……………….."And all that’s needed is the desire to be heard, the will to learn, and the ability to SEE."  A qutote taken from Understanding Comics, The Invisible Art, I find that this last statement made by the artist/the writer/the creator is- although very simple- very profound. This message speaks for all genres of art, of creating and expressing oneself- whether this is through literature, composing, painting, et. I enjoyed the book, it included a number of insights that i had never thought of prior to reading it

Understanding Comics/Hitchhiker’s Guide

On pages,  118-120 in Scott McCloud’s Understand Comics, he discusses the usage of single frame using abstract art to convey intangible emotions such as joy, madness, and anxiety.  80 percent of the frame examples he uses would not match the image that comes to my mind when thinking of that feeling.  However, I believe this concept of using frames like the ones shown in comics ties back into the concept of interactivity.  Granted there weren’t surrounding frames for each emotion on this page which would have helped the reader shape a better analysis of what the art was supposed to mean, but even if they were it would still be up to the reader to fill in "gutter" space or interpet each abstract image in his or her own way.  As for Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Game, I found it the most frustrating of all.  It would only let me get out of bed but not exit the room and no graphics ever appeared on the screen. 

Weekly Response

I was never one to read comic books growing up.  I still don’t read comic books.  I think part of it was because I never really watched a lot of cartoons growing up either.  One thing that I’ve always wondered is how do you read from each panel to each panel?  Sometimes the pages aren’t constructed in such a way that each panel is side by side and it is then easy to know to read from left to right, naturally.  Scott McCloud addressed this point in his book about comics.  While I was reading this book, I kept on catching myself first trying to figure out where to go from frame to frame when it wasn’t totally obvious.  The more I read, however, the easier it was to pick up on.  It wasn’t until maybe around 60 or 70 pages in that he touched on this area.  It was pretty breif, but the mention was made to help us as the readers realize that there are things in this world that are natural to us.  It is only normal for us to read from left to right, top to bottom — in the West anyway.  In the East, some things are different — including reading and writing styles/formats.  Differences between the two cultures are also noticable when it comes to comics.  Japanese-style comics were different and in some ways more advanced or ahead of the curve. 

After thinking about relationships between comics and some other sources of media, one common theme I found between comics and the game Zork is that both are read from frame-to-frame.  In between the frames are the ‘gutters’ of comics where the reader becomes involved and participates.  In the game Zork and others alike, the user is participating by playing and making decisions.  Also, the game is presented one "frame" at a time.  Each scene or space that you are in is a frame of time or space.  This is another relation I was able to come up with.  Scott McCloud talks about time and space in his book and how the size of a frame could possibly play a role in how long a scene is, or extend a dramatic moment by lengthening one frame over another.  Zork is able to present this through the text it responds to you with.  Based on the text, you can then determine which space you will be going in.