Digital Discourse

Preface

Giorgio Buccellati – January 2022

A website theory

I give here a presentation of the fundamental philosophy that underlies the notion of a scholarly website. I argue for the validity of a website that develops a full fledged “long argument”, with the same intent and method that characterize an argument presented in a book or article – though in an altogether different formal embodiment. In this regard, d-discourse.net serves as a programmatic introduction to the Cybernetica Mesopotamica cluster of websites.

The core principle of this approach is that a website ought to be based on a clear sense of structure that defines it as a recognizable whole. The concept of “digital discourse” refers precisely to the way in which multiple layers, relating to both data and argument, interact, or “discourse,” with each other. It is out of this interaction that the wholeness of the construct arises, while allowing at the same time for full access to the most minute of fragments that go into making the construct possible in the first place.

The specific way in which this can be implemented concerns both authors and readers: (1) authors must reclaim their responsibility to construct a proper digital discourse within the framework of a website, and (2) readers must also reclaim their responsibility to study a website as they would a book or an article.

Relevance

This understanding of digital publishing addresses the concern of current views about the negative impact of digitality on cognitive development. I argue that a fully committed structural approach to website writing and reading allows us to develop a powerful dimension of digital thought and thus to reach for an invigorating new brand of digital humanism.

Such humanistic view of digitality will in turn have an impact on the social and even the exact sciences, showing how awareness of the whole is indispensable for a proper assessment of the fragments into which the whole can be broken down.

The interplay between whole and fragments is an important aspect of this effort. While the fragments convey information, the whole calls for understanding. And this points in the direction of a deeper understanding of digital thought and digital discourse as the two polar aspects of our interaction with digitality.

Digital discourse refers to the document as the object of knowledge that embodies a dynamic interaction (“discourse”) among multiple narrative planes, while digital thought refers to the newly acquired human skill at controlling this interaction.

Implementation

I have come to deal with theory from a long and sustained confrontation with practice. This has materialized in a number of different websites, which implement the theory and have, in fact, induced me to articulate it in the first place. Writing programs to make these websites operational was an essential springboard in developing the theoretical dimension of the whole effort.

The websites which implement the theory are illustrated in the hub website Cybernetica Mesopotamica.

“Non chiederci la parola…”

The interplay between detail and depth, or between the fragments and the whole, is emblematically given voice in this early poem by Eugenio Montale, which is placed here in limine.

Non chiederci la parola che squadri da ogni lato l'animo nostro informe, e a lettere di fuoco lo dichiari e risplenda come un croco perduto in mezzo a un polveroso prato.	Don’t ask of us the word that squarely might encase our formless soul – its letters burnt as if with fire, a word that might as brightly shine as would a brilliant flower alone and lost in a dusty field.
Ah l'uomo che se ne va sicuro, agli altri ed a se stesso amico, e l'ombra sua non cura che la canicola stampa sopra uno scalcinato muro!	Ah, the man who can so confidently stride, friend to the others and to himself, uncaring as to how his shadow may hit a wall that's crumbling in the worst heat of day!
Non domandarci la formula che mondi possa aprirti, sì qualche storta sillaba e secca come un ramo. Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti, ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo.	Don’t ask of us the formula with which to open worlds: all that I have are but gnarled and bone dry syllables. All we can tell you is this, today: what we are not, what we do not want.

Eugenio Montale, da Ossi di seppia, 1923