SEL2008: Text and Hypertext

This module examines the interrelationship of cultural complexity and the technology used to represent language as text, where cultural complexity is measured in terms of a society's political institutions, economic institutions, and technological capability, and language representation technology refers to such factors as writing media, document production and distribution, educational institutions, and mechanisms of political and ideological control. The first half of the module examines this interrelationship from an historical perspective, and the second concentrates on contemporary electronic language representation technology: the principle of digital electronic representation of language, computational manipulation of electronic text, the Internet and its cultural implications. The second part of the module includes a practical component which introduces design and production of Web documents using HTML.