text-e

text-e was an online symposium that is interesting both as an online event and in terms of content. The site is tri-lingual (French, English and Italian) and brought a number of speakers, like Umberto Eco, around the subject of “impact of the Web on reading, writing and the diffusion of knowledge” in 2001.

The structure of the symposium has papers and interviews by the “speakers” on-line in various formats (MS e-book?). There was then a larger pool of participants who engaged in threaded discussions around the papers. The larger pool each are named and represented with a web page. Thus everyone got credit which probably explains why there is actually content on the site. (That UNESCO sponsored it also helped.)
Umberto Eco’s paper starts with a discussion of filters and the importance of common filters. In a time of excess we need filters. Eco worries that we will each have our own idiosyncratic filter and therefore have little in common. It is a variant on the common bible problem – a community needs a common text – a filter is simply a way of getting a common text from the excess. In other words, as we are discovering in TAPoR, a tool is a text and a text is a tool.