Definitions of Topos and Remediation

With Gabrielle!

Topos is the Greek word from which we get the English "topic".  The Greek literally means "place", used in ancient rhetoric to describe a place of thought.  In the Renaissance, "topic" came to mean the headings used to organize fields of knowledge.  The term topic is important to digital rhetoric because in a computer a topic can both visually represent and link to an explanation of the data it refers to.  Bolter argues that, on computers, topics exist not only as rhetorical devices in the mind of the author but as a real organizational structure within the computer, and that these topics can be used by both the author and the reader to organize and understand information.

• An outline of an essay uses topics to organize information, as does the essay itself.
• Tags on a blog represent the topics of each post as well as how frequently each topic appears, although the relationships among the topics are less rigidly defined than Bolter suggests they might be.

Remediation means "the correction of something bad or defective."  As Bolter uses it, remediation describes how learning to use hypertext affects how writers used analog text.  Bolter argues that analog texts can be written as hypertext, just as hypertext can be written as analog text, without taking advantage of the hypertextual advantages.  Remediation, again, as used by Bolter, describes how hypertexts offer a different reading experience than analog texts.  Bolter mentions a rivalry between hypertext and analog text but refrains from suggesting a winner, rather postulating that the existence of hypertext will change how readers engage with both hypertexts and analog texts.

• When photography became reliable, painting was remediated--if a perfect representation of something could be produced, the purpose of painting must go beyond that plain intent.  This is part of where the modern art movement came from.
• A newspaper article which contains multiple URLs throughout is mimicking hypertext's capacities although it is old-media.