Talk:George Landow (professor)

Encyclopedia quality?

Frankly this page seems rather more like a vanity page than an encyclopedia-quality article. It hardly seems to be referred to anywhere and no references support the claim that Landow is one of the leading professors in Victorian literature, Victorian painting, hypertext, hypermedia, electornic literature, postcolonial fiction, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and whatever else he claims to be. No academic awards or editorial positions are mentioned aside from the management of his own web pages, and I suspect that he and other internet-savvy professors (note that he's a "pioneer" of hypertext) may be figuratively running around and ghost-writing each others pages. Robert Coover, Shelley Jackson, Lev Manovich, etc. are obviously a very different story. Note however that Coover's list of selected works is only slightly longer, whereas he's practically a household name and many of those works have pages of their own. Who's ever heard of George Landow (professor) in comparison? I also want to point out that there's also an experimental filmmaker of the same name, aka Owen Land, which is how I found this page. (151.50.21.69 (talk) 01:07, 13 April 2010 (UTC))

'You are, of course, entitled to your opinion, but Landow is one of the top scholars in the field. He has keynoted the ACM hypertext conference and ACM WikiSym , his hypertext research is widely known and widely cited, and he wrote the most influential textbook textbook on literary hypertext. At the juncture of English Literature and Art History, he's written eight books. He is easily the peer of Manovich as a theorist of new media. Jackson and Coover, of course, are novelists; I don't know why you say they are a "different story"; Coover has been his colleague at Brown for decades and Jackson was their student. All of this ignores The Victorian Web, which (along with the Perseus Project at Harvards) was the first open, scholarly hypertext and thus the origin on Wikipedia -- in daily use a decade before Ward Cunningham's wiki was ever dreamt of. MarkBernstein (talk) 14:22, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

That may well all be true (isn't Perseus at Tuft's though not Harvard? - not that I really know much about its origins) but what particularly bothered me is that there are no citations for any of this outside of Landow himself and his immediate circle. I don't mean to be spying around and know nothing about your personal relationship but I clicked on your website and saw in 10 seconds that it says right at the top "neo victorian computing" which sounds like Landow in a nutshell and suggests to me some sort of connection. Browsing the pages for Jackson and Manovich they were noticeably more diverse and feel rather more like proper wikipedia pages citing different sources and with input obviously derived from different people. Sure Coover and Landow are colleagues at Brown, but you could say the same for hundreds of other people, it doesn't change the fact that Coover is one of the US's better known contemporary novelists and Landow is, well, not. If you turn to other academic departments at a university like Brown, I imagine you'll find faculty members, departmental chairs, and so on, more influential than Landow in their respective fields but with no little "who's who" wikipedia write-ups to show for it. But I suppose I'm being petty and it shouldn't be a surprise that people who basically study wikipedia should have their own pages on it. The same probably goes for bloggers etc.. (151.50.6.49 (talk) 00:51, 15 April 2010 (UTC))

Perseus used to be based at Harvard and moved to Tufts when Greg Crane went there.

You have me at a disadvantage; we know who I am, but you are strangely anonymous though apparently located in Rome. Do I know you?

My own connections with Landow are much like those of any senior researcher in literary hypertext. We were competitors in the 1980's, when Storyspace and Intermedia were rivals. We were collaborators in the '90s, when Storyspace provided a refuge from the collapse of Intermedia. In 2001, while Landow was a dean at National University of Singapore, I spent several weeks as a visiting fellow. We've been on many program committees together. I've spoken to his class a couple of times, and he's spoken at conferences I ran. I published some of his early hypertexts. An excerpt from his work on hypertext criticism appears in my anthology on Reading Hypertext.

Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology has been influential and widely cited -- it (and its subsequent revisions) is probably the most widely cited monograph in the field. You should have no difficulty finding references throughout the literature. Landow's paper on the navigation problem is also very widely cited. I'm not a Ruskin scholar, but my impression is that Landow's early work on Ruskin was important in reviving interest in a figure who was then neglected and out of favor. You seem to be trying to build a notability case, but there's really no case to be made: this one's a no brainer.

If you're interested in improving the page, some useful expansions might include Landow's foundation of the study of hypertext rhetoric (the 1987 paper on Arrival and Departure), his work on refuting the Navigation Problem, and the contribution of Context 32/The Victorian Web. MarkBernstein (talk) 14:18, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Request for additional info

This professor seems like a really interesting person with a lot of his stuff seemingly really interesting and experimental. Would it be possible for someone educated on him, and maybe his hypertext, electronic media things to be elaborated in more detail and depth on this page? I stumbled across this after seeing his Victorian Web site and found it incredibly fascinating. However, the content was extremely disorganized and seems to be relatively unchanged within the past 10-15 years. Seeing the discussion above makes me think that this article is incredibly academic in focus, but the attempts at making very specific information available on the web (as well as him apparently critiqueing post-modern scholars such as Derrida) makes me want to know more about him. If I find anything personally to help others out with this article, I'd be glad to contribute. Shaded0 (talk) 18:35, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

I think you'll find that the content if The Victorian Web is not, in fact, disorganized, but rather that the organization may not be evident to you at first glance. This is a frequent experience of readers new to hypertext. My impression is that The Victorian Web, which now has about a half million resources, is growing a little bit faster each year; since it's been growing for 26 years, though, the bulk of its material is bound to seem old.

But I agree that I'd like to see more detail on this page. Where shall we start? MarkBernstein (talk) 20:58, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

I think a decent place to start would be to break up the article with a small biography, then maybe some place to segment specifically his theory. The things from the header could either be left in or moved into his scholarly works. Additionally, I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to create a new article on one of his more important books (probably his Hypertext 3.0 one?). I can't say I own a copy of the book, so it might be difficult to write it up, but I'll see if I can pick up a copy. I found the first chapter of it online in pdf format and it seems to be a good overview of his ideas. Additionally, the Hypermedia article itself could be improved to delve into the history more and advances in the field. At the moment it seems more focused on examples, but it doesn't make entirely clear how the field developed from both Deconstructionists and from a Computer Mathematics perspective. Maybe a good place to start would be with improvements on Hypermedia? Shaded0 (talk) 20:54, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm supportive and will be happy to lend a hand (I've got all the books, incidentally), but I'll be traveling a lot in the next two weeks. FUIMarkBernstein (talk) 01:20, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

I added the section on Landow's honors because I thought they are relevant as well as give readers a general idea of his importance. I'm completely open to criticism/ suggestions for my edit - feel free to reach out. 17 September 2016 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.239.197.125 (talk) 18:20, 17 September 2016 (UTC)