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F E A T U R E S : You can take advantage of the numerous and recently updated bibliographies on Derrida and deconstruction. You can perform an javascript-powered site search for documents by keyword. For javascript-enabled browsers there is a floating navigation pad. It will link to the most recent updates. Or go directly to the text excerpts; recent additions include translations of new essays and some classics scanned-in. More visual data to be added soon. Right now, the video and audio menus mainly link to relevant bibliographies. |
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It is today, but actually this site was established quite a while ago as part of the non-commercial hydra webring dedicated to media theory, which comprised sites in Britain (1995 - 96: http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/johnm/ - now defunct), in Florida (1995 - 97: http://www.cas.usf.edu/fobo/ - now defunct), in Germany (1995 - 98: http://www.lake.de/home/lake/hydra/ and http://glas.lake.de - now defunct), in Minnesota (since 1996: http://www.hydra.umn.edu) and California (since 1998: http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/~hydra and, from of 9/1999 to 12/2000, at http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~hydra - both now defunct). The Minnesota site is now the main hub, and the one which will focus on growth. Readership of these pages has grown exponentially over the months, and currently they clock well over 300.000 visits per year, about 1.000 per day. However, since this is a non-profit site, I don't keep track of everything; there are scripts providing me with summaries of each 24-hour period, but watching you watching me, day in and day out is not as interesting as it sounds. Because of the age of many documents uploaded here and because of my limited time, much remains as it looked in the heady days of Mosaic. Forgive the mess, I am refurbishing slowly. The hydrapoetics began with a number of "links" when the web was young; pretty soon, I was permanently attached to the various screens and spent several hours per day online. In countless hours of surfing, mooing, emailing and some naive hacking, I decided to put together myself what I could not find. It struck me as the academic web turned into a global shopping mall that some things, and among them perhaps first and foremost "theory", the reflection on the medium itself, would have to include the potential for resistance to busy bustle. Of course I am not saying there are no kickbacks and economies invoked when this webring is offered "for free", suspended between a gift and a service - you decide for yourself. Suffice to say that among the reason for the shift westwards around the globe were financial ones, and so the two servers I use now are sponsored by state institutions which helpme maintain a few pages dedicated to academic browsing. This site has been available for free since its inception - browse the annual reports on www.krapp.org for more background. Because of its steady traffic from parts of the globe where bandwidth has a higher premium than in the new US economy, I have been slow to incorporate graphic complexity. Much of this site and the other sites on the Hydra remain largely text-based. Still, it has received recognition from various search portals as well as multiple listings on other people's sites dedicated to theory, philosophy, and related issues. It continues to rank highly even though I have little time to update things since I moved to the US, and despite the increasing commercialization of the web. |
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