Re: Political Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Digital Textbook Selection Processes

On 9 January 2013 07:03, Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Web Philosophy Community Group,
>
> Greetings. There are some salient philosophical topics with regard to
> political rhetoric, what is entailed from various implicit or explicit
> ontological suppositions or constructions, for instance with regard to
> concepts like "us" and "them". Insights into human nature can be obtained
> from such analysis of rhetoric, dialogue and discourse.
>
> Onto some of the philosophical topics and discourse analytical topics of
> political rhetoric, we can envision and observe occurrences in documents
> across the Web, where "us" is the American people and "them" is the
> government. We can also envision and observe suppositions and constructions
> where the public sector buildings' parking lots are filled with the cars of
> our friends and our neighbors during the hours of 9 to 5; in that
> supposition, the people in America are all "us". Interestingly, the people
> in the public buildings, when discussing the American people, the public,
> also make use of "us" and "them" suppositions and constructions.
>
> Rhetorical suppositions and constructions, including but not limited to
> those of the variety of "us" and "them", are often utilized to express
> ideas succinctly in discourse and often "us" pertains to the speaker and an
> audience in public speaking and "them" is some subset of mankind or society
> under discussion.
>
> Political rhetoric also often includes simplifications which predate mass
> media; for instance, the government was Bill Clinton, then was George W.
> Bush, and is, today, Barack Obama. Such simplifications can also be
> observed in public opinion polls, including online public opinion polls,
> where there are the approval ratings of the few visible representatives, or
> of the entire Congress, as opposed to more detailed or granular public
> opinion polls which might invite citizens to engage in civil discourse.
>
> With regard to philosophical topics of political rhetoric, context,
> linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis, and argument reconstruction are
> topical. Suppositions and constructions, as aforementioned, may pertain to
> semantic models, conceptual backdrops, the contexts of utterances pertinent
> to meaning. In the philosophy of science, the semantic view of theories
> indicates models as relating to theories. Each concept’s or theory’s
> definition includes, beyond semantics, logic and mathematics, its inclusion
> in a set of models. Each model contains a set of interoperating concepts
> and theories. Suppositions or constructions can pertain to models,
> abstractly, semantic backdrops, parts of the context in which statements or
> utterances are made and have meaning. Additionally, in spoken language,
> there is also both prosody and intonation.
>
> In addition to philosophical, linguistic, and social science topics,
> formal methods in argument reconstruction are topical. The understanding of
> such things, the capability to circumnavigate topics, to have agility in
> terms of suppositions and constructions, models, to be able to argue any
> side of each topic, are some of the goals of the study of argumentation.
>
> Argument reconstruction is also a topic interesting to philosophy and we
> could consider whether philosophical argumentation is distinct from
> conversational, mathematical, scientific, legal, and political
> argumentation (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentation_theory#Kinds_of_argumentation).
>
>
> Onto the topic of digital book selection processes, there are some salient
> differences between systems for book retail, systems for libraries, and
> systems for the selection of textbooks in American public schools, though
> technology and software can enhance and convenience each. Topical concepts
> include: free market capitalism, breadth of options, multiculturalism,
> nationalism, centralization and decentralization, government accountability
> and transparency, roles of the family and of the state, community, public
> school systems, and numerous state and federal laws.
>
> While some have considered web-based app store models for the sale of
> textbooks to schoolboards, others consider models with schoolboard-local
> databases and client-side software, models where each schoolboard can have
> each candidate digital textbook in their database and where each
> schoolboard member can make use of computer technology during group
> processes. We can see that a niche exists for such tools and equipment,
> collaborative software, and that argumentation technologies can enhance
> such software.
>
> The number of digital textbook options available for schoolboards to
> select from is expected to increase and, as the dataset is a large number
> of books, the topic has an additional applicability to library science and
> to the digital humanities. Digital books will have numerous features beyond
> ink and paper books as well and discussions about and selection processes
> of digital textbooks are expected to be more complex than those about and
> of previous ink and paper textbooks.
>
> With regard to linking into digital textbooks, we can envision URI
> formats, e.g. EPUB Canonical Fragment Identifier (EPUBCFI) Specification (
> http://idpf.org/epub/linking/cfi/epub-cfi.html) or Media Fragments URI (
> http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/,
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-media-frags-recipes-20111201/), for
> referencing and linking to broader instantaneous configurations of digital
> textbooks, including combinations of hypertext, multimedia, and interactive
> 3D graphics. The capabilities to quote from digital textbooks and to
> utilize hyperlinks with digital textbooks are important for both
> collaborative studying scenarios and discussions about digital textbooks.
> For documents with web components, user interface widgets, the capability
> to hyperlink into or bookmark into specific configurations of digital
> textbooks is topical.
>
> There are additionally the topics of indexing, searching, and retrieving
> digital textbook content, hypertext, multimedia and interactive 3D
> graphics, including for both students' desktop search and scholarship
> scenarios and schoolboards' navigation, discussion, and selection of
> textbooks from a large number of digital textbooks.
>

Would a digital textbook be considered a document?

Could you go into more detail as to how you think media fragments could be
to provide linkability?


>
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Adam Sobieski
>