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

On 01/09/2013 07:03 AM, Adam Sobieski 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.
>

Just to say, *thanks* for the on- topic email Adam. The point re the use 
of "us" as an indexical is particularly interesting. There are no 
argumentation standards I know of as well. Re epubs, I believe the W3C 
has a workshop coming up on this topic you could attend next month:

http://idpf.org/news/w3c-announces-workshop-on-electronic-books-and-the-open-web



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