_______ _______ __ / _____/ /__ __/ / / / /__ / / ____ __ __ __ ___ __ __ ____ / / / ___/ __ / / / __ \ / / / / / //__/ / //_ \ / __ \ / / / /____ / /_/ / / /_/ / / /_/ / / / / / / / / /_/ / / / \_____/ \____/ \____/ \____/ /_/ /_/ /_/ \__/_/ /_/ August, 1996 _EJournal_ Volume 6 Number 3 ISSN 1054-1055 There are 1100 lines in this issue. An Electronic Journal concerned with the implications of electronic networks and texts. 777 E-mail Subscribers in 32 Countries University at Albany, State University of New York EJournal@Albany.edu CONTENTS: [This is line 20] Guest Editor's Introduction E-PUBLISHING AND HYPERTEXT PUBLISHING [at line 72 ] by Doug Brent University of Calgary dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca Feature Article HYPERTEXT NOTES [at line 406 ] by Richard Andersen andersen@canuck.com Notes and Comments LIVING IN HYPERTEXT [at line 524 ] by John December john@december.com MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNISM IN [at line 778 ] "HYPERTEXT NOTES": A call for theoretical consistency and completeness by Charles Ess Drury College dru001d@vma.smsu.edu Information about _EJournal_ [at line 1021 ] About Subscriptions and Back Issues About Supplements to Previous Texts About _EJournal_ People [at line 1070 ] Board of Advisors Consulting Editors ********************************************************************* ***************************************************************** * This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright * * 1996 by _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away * * the journal and its contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and * * all financial interest is hereby assigned to the acknowledged * * authors of individual texts. This notification must accompany * * all distribution of _EJournal_. * ***************************************************************** ====================================================================== Special thanks to Richard Andersen for his invaluable assistance in formatting the hypertext version of this issue of _EJournal_. ====================================================================== Guest Editor's Introduction E-PUBLISHING, HYPERTEXT PUBLISHING, [line 74] AND ANDERSEN'S "HYPERTEXT NOTES" by Doug Brent University of Calgary Faculty of General Studies dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dabrent Taylor and Saarinen ask, "If an electronic text can be published in printed form, is it really electronic?" This issue of _EJournal_ explores that question by presenting a cluster of interrelated hypertexts: the feature essay "Hypertext Notes" by Richard Andersen and two shorter hypertext essays by John December and Charles Ess. These shorter pieces are in one sense about the Andersen piece, but they also develop independent discussions of the theory and practice of writing in hypertext. This issue is therefore something of a breakthrough for _EJournal_, as it represents our first real attempt to use the hypertextual capacities of the World Wide Web to do more than link together linear documents which are essentially print-like in nature. (In fact, having explored the Web in search of true hypertext documents, I can report that they are relatively rare in scholarly discourse, and that this issue, while far from unique, represents something of a departure for the entire discourse community.) This format presents some problems for a journal which was not originally designed for WWWeb distribution. Since these pieces are written in hypertext, they cannot be presented in the familiar downloadable-and-printable listserve version of _EJournal_ except as what Stuart Moulthrop calls "a paper shadow of an electronic text" (or in this case, a linear electronic shadow of a non-linear electronic text). If you have access to a Web browser, even a relatively primitive browser such as Lynx [1], you should STOP READING THIS TEXT NOW and point your browser to: [line 109] http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/v6n3/v6n3.html Otherwise, you will have to be content with reading only a linear version of the December and Ess pieces, and the editorial note you are reading now, without the rich layering of hypertextual references that makes them what they are. The Andersen piece is so tightly connected with the hypertext medium that it will be completely unavailable except for a first-node teaser. (Readers of the hypertext version, conversely, might be interested in going back to look at this listserve/ e-mail version to see what happens when a hypertext essay is un-hypertexted, an interesting reversal of the normal pattern. The effect is an odd sense of discontinuity that is invisible in hypertext but striking when the text is flattened into linear format.) All three essays, in their content and by the example of their structure, comment in various ways on the creation of meaning in hypertext. Andersen attempts to exploit both the non-linear form of the medium and its ability to link to multiple documents, weaving a tapestry of quotations and links that challenge the reader to "make what you will of this essay." December, a veteran of hypertext publishing, uses Andersen's experiment as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the characteristics of this new medium and of the importance of good hypertext design in making it accessible to readers. Ess, equally well versed in the philosophical aspects of cyberspace, uses the essay as a jumping-off point for an exploration of how modernist perspectives can be applied to what is normally considered the most postmodern of media. I will avoid the temptation to dive directly into this subject myself and refer readers who are interested in my comments on the matter to my hypertext essay "Rhetorics of the Web" http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dabrent/webliteracies/pointer.html Rather, I would like to use the rest of this introduction to address some of the many questions about the nature of text that the form of the issue itself opens up. Print has always been a highly intertextual medium, even if its physical form has tended to disguise the intertextuality behind the facade of the solitary Romantic author. But the exercise of editing this issue of _EJournal_ has drawn my attention to a particular set of questions about textuality that are peculiar to the business of massaging other people's words into publishable form --a business common in the academic world but suddenly defamiliarized by the new medium of hypertext. Question 1: The Status of the Editor [line 155] For me, perhaps the most pressing question raised by this experience is that of the role of the author versus the role of the editor. There has always been a collaborative relationship, usually unseen by the reader, between author and editor. The editor may exercise no more control than fixing up a few typos or putting references into a standard format. At other times the editor may make suggestions for extensive rewriting, often relayed from peer reviewers. Occasionally the editor of unusual stamina or unusually pressed for copy may undertake a thorough revision of an article. But always it is understood that the author has the last word, can always choose to accept the "or else" threat if the editorial push and pull comes down to "accept these revisions or else we won't publish your work." The unseen collaboration never rises to the status of complete co-authorship. Similarly, the role of commentators is always clearly demarcated. Frequently an editor will solicit comments on a controversial article and publish them either in the same issue or in a succeeding one, usually giving the author an opportunity to respond. The text becomes a chain of texts, but always with original article, comments and responses arranged in linear sequence and clearly marked by authorship. The practice of shipping material by e-mail for a listserve journal such as this one has vastly improved the speed of the process but it is still a quicker version of the linear sequence. But hypertext presents entirely new possibilities. When she reviewed this piece for publication, Nancy Kaplan made a very interesting suggestion: I think inviting a few well-known hypertext theorists/critics to "comment" or respond to "hypertext notes" would be far too tame (and anyway this sort of thing has been done before). Perhaps commissioning some hypertextual essays and then providing extensive cross-linking among the whole set (perhaps even some visual blurring of boundaries, renaming whole nodes and links to bring all the texts you receive into an indistinguishable aggregate of nodes and links) would be more interesting, if only because no one "individual text" would be central, the others relegated to "comments on," yet the whole could also be read as an integrated, communal discourse not co- authored in the traditional way, but conjoined by the editor's activities. [line 196] When you think about it, the natural mode of hypertext is compilation rather than linear creation, especially as the WWWeb begins to be dominated by sprawling hypertext documents that are chiefly made up of links to other documents, or other lists of links. As Bolter points out, this aspect of hypertext in some ways takes us back to the medieval manuscript with its layers of marginalia that over time found their way into the heart of the text. And yet I find myself deeply disturbed at the thought of submerging the author's text below a set of other texts as an "indistiguishable aggregate of nodes and links." This isn't the twelfth century. The new technologies have not yet gotten us back to a place where we can be comfortable with texts whose voices gradually become more and more blurred. And perhaps they weren't comfortable with this then either. Possibly writers in a manuscript society simply lacked the means to prevent it except by dire injunction. (See Revelation 22:18-19, in which a curse is levelled on anyone who adds or subtracts from the text of the book --God's copyright notice.) And finally, I'm uncomfortable with the power imbalance this suggests. This arrangement would give the editor supreme authority to blend voices, an authority always in the past reserved to the author. I remember how thoroughly annoyed I was when I found that one of my works had, in being republished, been encrusted with other texts interpolated into the margins. I was not so much irritated at what had been done to "my" text: I was irritated at the fact that the new text looked as though I, not the editor, had done the interpolations. I am a little embarrassed by my reaction --I flamed the editor of the reprint seriously enough that he has never asked to reprint any of my work since. However, the incident points up the fact that, however much we want to share our work and are flattered when it gets cited, quoted or reproduced as a piece of the "intellectual commons," five hundred years of print has accustomed us to treat our words as extensions of our own identity, not to be messed with by others without our express consent nor to be inserted into others' works without acknowledgement. [line 233] To exercise the editor's power to do so just seems to me unwarranted, especially since the editor has that power, not because she necessarily has any claim to wisdom that the author does not, but more or less by accident: the editor, not the author, is the last person to handle the text before sending it off to the typesetter, and therefore has the last word _de facto_. Therefore I have compromised. I have added links from Andersen's text to the comments on it, but I have not blended them into an "indistinguishable aggregate of nodes and links." This might be no more than a "papyrocentric" attitude" (a particularly felicitous coinage by Stevan Harnad) that I have been unable to shake off. But in another sense, the medium of hypertext seems to invite exactly this sort of compromise. In print, most intertextuality is covert. Citations and acknowledgements pages cannot allow even the most diligent author to credit the myriad of influences on her work. But when hypertext allows many "influences" to be incorporated into a work as discrete chunks of text, literally stored as files on another host, it seems only natural to tag them by author. Even if all of these voices still have other voices embedded in them, if the authors are really no more than Foucaultean gaps through which others speak, at least the top level of intertextuality can be tagged. Question 2: The Status of the "Publisher" Another question, not a new one but always it seems being asked in new ways, concerns the status of "publication." The lead article in this issue, "Hypertext Notes," can be said to have been "published," on this day on this time, by _EJournal_. Yet the act of publishing it in this case simply means setting up a link to a set of files. This issue carries many other links to many other sets of files, including some hypertext documents which have been "self-published" on the author's own web site and others which have been "published" by other electronic journals. In a very real sense the act of publishing, like the act of editing referred to above, is becoming more an act of compilation than of "making available to the public" in the usual sense. Every one of these texts could have been "made available to the public" by the author, with no intervention from _EJournal_. So what is _EJournal_ in its role as publisher actually doing to these texts that adds value that their authors have not already added? [line 276] The question is made more perplexing in that it needs to be by our traditional expectation that "publishing" has something to do with bridging the gap between the author and the distribution mechanism (from typesetter to bookstore). When there is no such gap, publishing only makes sense if thought of as the type of speech act Austin called a "performative," an utterance that accomplishes something which is not physical but which, like a promise, a marriage, a sentence in a court of law, is nonetheless real. Publishing in this medium collapses together with editing as an assumption of _responsibility_ for the integrity of the work. A speech act does not take place unless certain "felicity conditions" are met: one of the felicity conditions of electronic publishing is that the journal has enough reputation to confer more status on the text that its author could by himself. This reputation is aided by a set of systems for ensuring quality (the peer review system, etc.), but ultimately it too does not "really" exist except in the minds of the readers. Print publication, too, is built on trust, but this trust has more physical correlatives. The expense of paper publication necessitated a set of mechanisms to ensure that the money was not expended on material that would not turn a profit (in commercial publication) or that would not advance human knowledge (in academic publication). With the onset of electronic publication, this filtering function, evolved more or less secondarily as insurance against wasted expense, now becomes the most important value-added service that a "publisher" performs. In short, one of the contributions of the electronic medium to the changing of relationships and functions is the disengagement of process of certifying value from the process of making material available. I go into this argument in more detail in my article "Stevan Harnad's Subversive Proposal": http://rachel.albany.edu/~ejournal/v5n1/v5n1.html Question 3: The Status of the "Text" And lastly, there is the question of stability. Ted Jennings has articulated _EJournal's_ editorial policy as follows: "If we are to be useful in the evolution of the network culture . . . _EJournal_ has to be "dependable" within the traditions of codex reliability" (V4N4 ll 522-25) Therefore the journal is archived on a fileserver hedged about with restrictions to make sure that "there will be a place to find what every issue looked like on mailing day." This issue, too, is archived in such a fashion, so that all the internal text will be preserved in the state in which you are reading it today. But in the hypertext version, the "text" sprawls outside the boundaries of the fileserver. It is full of links to other texts that will gradually change as their authors update them, or point to nothing at all as the unstable web makes them obsolete. So the attempt to maintain a stable copy of this text for archival purposes begins to look more and more like an antique practice of Bolter's "late age of print." As a transitional policy to help ejournals earn the trust of people used to print, it has done an important job. However, it goes so against the grain of the WWWeb medium that the entire business of maintaining stable copy is being called seriously into question. Moreover, Andersen maintains his own copy of "Hypertext Notes" --the "director's cut" if you like, free of the links that I have interpolated-- and potentially changing as he adds new links and modifies old ones. See: [line 336] http://www.canuck.com/~andersen/hypertextnotes It is fortunate that the versatility of the medium allows a link from this archived version to the author's developing version and thereby renders meaningless the question of which version is the "right" one. It all depends on one's purpose in reading it. The degree to which the new media complexify the relations between authorship, editorship, publication and librarianship is no longer surprising. But it always seems as though, just when you think that the major questions have all at least been asked if not answered, a new set of experiences brings you face to face with a whole new set of questions which are outpacing their answers. As Taylor and Saarinen remark, "Our dilemma is that we are living at the moment of transition from print to electronic culture. It is too late for printed books and too early for electronic texts. Along this boundary we must write our work." NOTES [1] Many people who don't have access to a SLIP/PPP account, and therefore can't use the latest slick Web browser such as Netscape or Mosaic, think that they have no access to the World-Wide Web at all. However, many internet service providers (such as the academic computing services that many readers of _EJournal_ use) do provide access through Lynx, a decidedly unsexy but completely workable text- based browser that runs on a UNIX host. Try exiting your mail reader and typing the following at your top prompt: lynx http://rachel.albany.edu/~ejournal/v5n1/v5n1.html If nothing interesting happens, contact your computing service and see if Lynx is available anywhere on the system. You may have power that you never knew you had! REFERENCES [line 372] Bolter, Jay David. _Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing_. Fairlawn, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991. Jennings, Ted. "Archiving Electronic Journals: Permanence, Integrity, Linking, Citation, Copyright." _EJournal_ V4N4, 1994, ll. 521-612. http://rachel.albany.edu/~ejournal/v4n4/edit.html Moulthrop, Stuart. "Shadow of an Informand." http://raven.ubalt.edu/Moulthrop/hypertexts/hoptext/ A_Beginning07084.html (raven was not responding, 8/20/96) Taylor, M. and E. Saarinen. "Telewriting." _Imagologies: Media Philosophy_. New York: Routledge, 1993. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Doug Brent University of Calgary Faculty of General Studies dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dabrent -------------------------------------------------------------------- [ This essay in Volume 6, Number 3 of _EJournal_ (August, ] [ 1996) is (c) copyright _EJournal_. Permission is hereby ] [ granted to give it away. _EJournal_ hereby assigns any and ] [ all financial interest to D. Brent. This note must ] [ accompany all copies of this text. ] =================================================================== HYPERTEXT NOTES [line 406] by Richard Andersen andersen@canuck.com http://www.canuck.com/~andersen This is a sort of experiment in what can be done with hypertext. My purpose is to exploit the medium of hypertext in a way that is only rarely done, especially on the web, in order to make some points about a wide variety of aspects of digital text. I've seen several essays on the web (or generally speaking on the 'net) which mimic the paper paradigm and possibly include either: - links to any word within the document that seems "linkable" (for example every mention of Microsoft linked to www.microsoft.com -- usually useless, but a novelty none-the-less, and novelty means a lot these days) or - links at the bottom to the "next page," amounting to little more than a digital page turner. Others actually exploit the hypertext, but some of those echo the linear experience of traditional (paper) text. One scholar notes that "one is reminded of the incunabula period of the book trade, during which books were printed to look as much like manuscripts as possible." (Doug Brent. "Stevan Harnad's 'Subversive Proposal'" _EJournal_, V1N5 [June 1995]) Ironically, the quote comes from this publication (_EJournal_), which although currently available via the web as well as via an ftp plain-text archive, still more or less maintains much of the "look and feel" (broadly speaking) of a paper publication. Such a format is currently dominant with scholarly work available on the 'net, including essays and articles by the digirati (although notable exceptions include commercial fiction and non-fiction available at the Eastgate site). One reason may be that even basic html mark-up involves investing extra resources which may be unavailable to largely volunteer publications run for scholarly brownie points at most (see Fytton Rowland's "Electronic Journals: Neither Free nor Easy," _EJournal_ V4N2 [June 1994]). [line 444] There's a lot to be said about accessibility and the digital library, but hypertext offers a chance to do something radically different with essays (discounting "multimedia," which is another ball of wax entirely and for that matter apes a mode of face-to-face/ one-to-many presentation which has been around for decades) to the extent that they bear little resemblance to what we currently think of when we think of textual works. Making up the header of each page of principal, WWWeb version of this essay is what, for lack of better term, I will call a "hyperdex" (by distant analogy with "index"). The hyperdex is the rows of symbols; if you connect to a page that doesn't have the hyperdex, you've escaped from this (again, for lack of better term) essay. External links are accompanied by an asterisk. The hyperdex represents links to each page in this essay. With regards to content, the hyperdex symbols and their respective pages are in no particular order outside of what the reader creates --I have intentionally chosen symbols as independent of order as ISO characters will allow so as to avoid imposing my own order onto the text. I've steered more or less clear of text formatting (the appearance of the text from the web browser page) and structure within the html mark up (such as
and ) for the same reason. For convenience, internal links to each page's hyperdex are strewn throughout the text, although depending on your settings this might not always be necessary, as some pages may fill only one screen. I have used no graphics, sounds or image maps because I think such defeats the purpose of a hypertext experiment. This text is authored with Netscape in mind; a germane advantage to Netscape and its ilk is that when you've read one of the files within this whole document, the respective symbol in the hyperdex will turn red (or perhaps another colour, depending on your custom preferences). In this way you'll be able to know what you've covered and what you haven't; you can connect to as many or as few of the pages as you'd like via either the hyperdex or via links within the pages, some of which merely move you about on the page. Some browsers allow you (with cursor positioned over link) to look at the bottom of the screen and see which URL the link will take you to. [line 485] Make what you will of this essay. I've intentionally avoided explicitly outlining the manner in which the document is written --it's a kind of a puzzle or tapestry which can be put together on several levels, for example what I'm saying and why I'm saying it this way. The work is different every time it's read, and I suppose the meaning varies. In some ways this kind of document seems unfathomable, maybe because of how we've been trained to read, and trained to think. The writing is more or less colloquial, i.e. it leans more towards the way people talk than the way they write. I don't know whether that's a good idea or not, but I wanted to by design reflect a bit of what I've been reading on the 'net. On the same note, some of the sources are rather unconventional, e.g. e-mail messages or typo-infested net-documents with relatively unknown origins. [Editor's Note: That's all for this first-node teaser. To see the rest of this hypertext, you'll need to look up the WWWeb version at http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/v6n3/ andersen/andersen.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Andersen andersen@canuck.com http://www.canuck.com/~andersen -------------------------------------------------------------------- [ This essay in Volume 6, Number 3 of _EJournal_ (August, ] [ 1996) is (c) copyright _EJournal_. Permission is hereby ] [ granted to give it away. _EJournal_ hereby assigns any and ] [ all financial interest to R. Andersen. This note must ] [ accompany all copies of this text. ] =================================================================== LIVING IN HYPERTEXT [line 524] by John December john@december.com http://www.december.com/web/text/index.html DREAM Early in my education in the World Wide Web as viewed through Mosaic, I had a dream in which I was in second grade again, playing soccer. I was in the stream of legs scrambling, and the colorful ball on the grass in my dream was a node that linked to some other place, a lake where I fished in high school, years and miles away from that soccer game. In my dream, I need only mentally "click" on the ball to get to the lake, and then the lake was a broad expanse, rippling in sunlight, the smell of summer hot and languid, the crickets chirping in the early evening. Nothing about hypertext I've learned since then has made as strong an impact on me as this dream. I've found no over-arching theory which has laid bare hypertext's essential nature; the books I've read about hypertext seem oriented to another kind of language, a brand of hypertext intended for stand-alone proprietary systems, hypertext that is very different from the open, global, chaotic, dynamic play of meaning and association on the World Wide Web. REACTION [line 549] I find Richard Andersen's hypertext notes intriguing. Sometimes, however, the motivation for the jumps seems too arbitrary to satisfy me, but I expect this in an experiment; and I admire the limits he's pushed. As a notebook of doorways to new meanings, this text works well. Andersen claims that his essay is "a puzzle or tapestry which can be put together on several levels." Structurally, I can see how the "hyperdex" binds multiple levels together, like the table of contents or the index of a book. As a reader, I feel immersed in this structure --I feel responsible for putting together the meaning of the text myself, rather than relying on the author to lead me through it. When I follow the links from the symbols, I find so many branches and quotes that I have difficulty discerning the argument that this text is making --unless this text is making the argument that hypertext encourages an abundance of viewpoints, like a documentary without a narrator. What I find most intriguing is the way Andersen's text binds other texts into its hyperdex. The hyperdex, to me, is the structure that makes this essay "hang together." Andersen seems to be saying that it is the job of the hypertext writer to "point the browser" and then ask the reader to take from that abundance what he or she will. Poets, notably Neruda, were said to "leap" from meaning to meaning, utilizing the central feature of poetry, the metaphor, as the basis for creating meaning. The high-energy metaphors of Emily Dickinson, the universality in the particular, the leveraging of what is known to the unknown, is perhaps what I think hypertext, like poetry, can approach. Andersen's text evoked this idea of "leaping" for me. I like Andersen's use of a symbolic table to create new meanings, and most of his criticisms and observations are apt and accurate. However, some of his observations don't have the depth you might otherwise expect. For example, his critique of "links to any word within the document that seems `linkable' (for example every mention of Microsoft linked to www.microsoft.com --usually useless, but a novelty none-the-less..." (Andersen 1996) is a fair criticism of "over-linking" in most cases. This "over-linking" criticism is a frequently-stated critique of Web hypertext, but it is not usually analyzed further. [line 593] An over-linking scheme in hypertext such as what Andersen (and many others) describe may be very useful for certain purposes and audiences. For example, a technical manual may contain key phrases, terms, and concepts, and these may be linked to their explication everywhere they occur in the hypertext. Why? Because the author of the hypertext cannot depend on the reader to choose the proper path(s) through the manual. This makes it important to cross-link key terms and phrases throughout. The reader, with intelligent use of his or her browser (i. e., paying attention to the shading/ color-changing cues that record which hypertext links have been visited in graphical browsers such as Netscape) --and self-control (not following every possible link just because it occurs on a page)-- can make very effective use of such an "over-linked" document. In the end, Andersen's text is a strong experiment and a useful tapestry for encountering many issues involved in the creation of meaning with hypertext. CHARACTERISTICS The World Wide Web has inherent characteristics that affect its expressive possibilities (December, 1996a): --- Unbound in space/ time: Information provided on the Internet is available every day, around the clock, and around the world (pending network operation). --- Bound in use context: Web-based hypertext fosters associations among works through links, giving rise to networks of meaning and association among many information sources that may be scattered across the globe and written by many authors. --- Distributed, non-hierarchical: The Web's technical organization as an application using the Internet for a client/server model influences the disintegration of user focus on a single outlet for experiencing content. QUALITIES [line 631] The World Wide Web's hypertext gives the author opportunities to create works which are: --- Multi-role: The Web's users can be not only consumers of information, but can be providers as well. --- Porous: A web doesn't have just one entry point; any of its pages can serve as the starting point for a user. The user may find that different pages in the web give them the best viewpoint into the information for their needs. Other users may enter a web at a certain page because of a keyword search. The result is that designers can't depend on (nor should they expect) users to follow a particular starting point and path through a web. --- Dynamic: The Web is characteristically, notoriously changeable, with new technologies (servers, browsers, network communication) as well as new content being introduced continuously. --- Interactive: Web developers can do more than "broadcast" information. They can elicit feedback from users (through electronic mailto links and forms), and provide Web-based threaded discussion boards or Java-based interactive applications. --- Competitive: Because of its distributed characteristic and dynamic qualities, the Web's content developers face extreme competition for user attention. METHODOLOGY In response to these characteristics and qualities, I have created a web development methodology http://www.december.com/present/webweave.html that addresses how I think information might be shaped on the Web, borrowing from my experience in computer software development, technical communication, Web development, and Internet information resource tracking and indexing. REALITIES [line 672] But the human response to online hypertext doesn't always conform to the neat steps of a methodology. I'm surprised by the frustration some users feel upon using hypertext on a screen; they report: - "I get tired of clicking." - "I want to print out the whole thing so that I can use it in my work." - "I don't know where to go." - "I don't see the transitions from one file to another." - "I get to a file and I don't know why I'm there." - "I follow the links from the pages and get lost." - "I follow the links from the pages and then spend a lot of time looking at things I don't think are very useful." - "I don't like things that are so fragmented." These frustrations may arise from many sources: - The structure of a hypertext may not meet the needs or expectations of a particular user. - The user may not like reading text on the screen. - The user may be unfamiliar with hypertext and the Web. - The user may have not be motivated to read/use the information. - The user may have a low ability to use hypertext (hypertext reading ability has been associated with spatial reasoning ability). - The user may not know how to use their Web browser effectively. - The user may have trouble applying information found on line, leading to feelings of "information overload," "getting lost," and spending time sorting out "useless information." Despite the problems that some users report, I think that, given good methodologies to exploit them, there are potential benefits of Web-based hypertext. POTENTIALS [line 706] On one level, I see hypertext as a way to play with metaphor and association; at a more pragmatic level, I see hypertext as a way to layer information. LAYERING FOR MEANING I like the idea of layering, of the potential for a text to expand and elaborate on itself. In literary works, the process of revisiting, or narrative recursion, as in Faulkner, adds a texture based on an almost hypnotic re-working of a point of view. Information, I believe, can benefit from using layering techniques, in which different views of information are shown to different audiences. I've implemented a simple kind of layering in Internet Web Text (December, 1996b) by providing alternate views of information. Internet Web Text covers the basics of Internet and Web-based information navigation and use. For each topic I cover in the text, I provide a simple list of important resources. I also provide the same set of resources with an expanded narrative describing each item in the list. The overall structure of Internet Web Text consists of an index page linked to sets of list and narrative pages. The resulting structure helps users navigate the text based on their desire either for a quick-summary list of the resources discussed or a narrative describing those resources. This is an example of layering hypertext for meaning. LAYERING FOR SCALE Hypertext can also be used to layer information to help users focus on a particular part of a large body of information. A simple hierarchical subject tree such as "Lycos" helps users get increasing detail with each selection of a branch. TOWARD A DIALOGIC WEB [line 743] Ultimately, the layers of meaning within and among hypertext works can give rise to a global, collaborative text that is constantly in flux. No doubt there are serious questions for which Web authors will need answers --questions about intellectual property, economic models, security and privacy, and information quality. But in order to approach these questions, we need hypertext critics and practitioners alike to engage in a detailed analysis of how hypertext is used on the Web and how to reveal and explicate its potential. REFERENCES December, J. (1996a). Web Development. Troy, NY: December Communications, Inc. http://www.december.com/web/develop.html December, J. (1996b). Internet Web Text. Troy, NY: December Communications, Inc. http://www.december.com/web/text/ -------------------------------------------------------------------- John December john@december.com http://www.december.com/john/index.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- [ This essay in Volume 6, Number 3 of _EJournal_ (August, ] [ 1996) is (c) copyright _EJournal_. Permission is hereby ] [ granted to give it away. _EJournal_ hereby assigns any and ] [ all financial interest to J. December. This note must ] [ accompany all copies of this text. ] ==================================================================== [line 777] MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNISM IN "HYPERTEXT NOTES": A call for theoretical consistency and completeness by Charles Ess Drury College dru001d@vma.smsu.edu "Hypertext Notes," a self-described experiment, serves as a rich and rewarding example of hypertext. Its opening premise --that most hypertextual work retains the linear structure familiar to us from print-- is clearly correct, and the author's effort to develop and explore the non-linear possibilities of writing in hypertext promises to enhance our understanding of both the possibilities and limits of hypertext. I believe that "Hypertext Notes" nicely succeeds in this project, though not necessarily in ways it may have intended. (This is not a criticism: the author is intentionally vague about the various intentions of the project.) For me, "Hypertext Notes" raises some central theoretical problems which I believe hypertext authors and readers must confront more directly, if we are to avoid potentially fatal contradictions and conceptual muddles. As I raise these problems, however, I fear that I may sound excessively reactionary and curmudgeonly. To help offset this impression, you may want to indulge me in a little autobiography (and a lot of shameless bragging) --the point of which is to establish that I come to hypertext in general and "Hypertext Notes" in particular with a long and respectable record of involvement and enthusiasm. I also come to hypertexts *primarily* with the intentions of a classroom teacher. My authoring of hypertexts is almost exclusively focused on exploiting the medium to (a) help students better understand difficult material, in part by (b) using the links to articulate the often complex and multiple conceptual relationships between different sorts of material. My primary model for hypertexts, then, includes the simple notion that authors have a rather clear notion of what they want to say to their readers --including just what the web of links and linked material *mean*. Admittedly, much of the literature surrounding hypertext calls my simple paradigm into question. It may be helpful to remember here that poststructualist and postmodern theorists --who dominate most of the theoretical discussion of hypertext-- attack my simple paradigm in various ways. Roughly, this paradigm is seen as modernist and structuralist, precisely because it assumes that authors intend meaning for their readers, meaning that is partly conveyed through structures (logical, syntactical, etc., especially as these structures are bound up with the linearity of printed texts). More horrifically, this paradigm is associated with an Enlightenment meta-narrative, one that surreptitiously accords totalitarian power to something called "reason," as the meta-narrative overtly but deceptively claims that human liberation and fulfillment will come through the expansion and victory of this reason over earlier forms of knowledge and social organization. [line 831] The poststructuralist/ postmodern alternatives to the allegedly totalizing/ totalitarian reason of Enlightenment include "decentering," a process of undermining centers of authority and meaning allegedly privileged by the Enlightenment meta-narrative. Hypertext is celebrated as embodying this process of decentering, because the hypertextual medium dilutes, if not obliterates, the "authority" of the author, throwing the full weight of constructing meaning onto the "reader" who, now freed from the ostensibly unnecessary restrictions of print media --including the dreaded "linearity" of print-- can manoeuvre through hypertexts in whatever sequence and fashion he or she chooses. My point is not to argue for an either/ or --a simple right/ wrong choice between modernist and postmodernist paradigms. Such an either/ or itself represents the classically modernist dualism of Descartes --one rather inconsistently urged upon us by postmoderns who assume just such an either/ or as they urge us to reject modernity in favor of postmodernism! Rather, using "Hypertext Notes" as an example, I argue first that the modernist paradigm of an author who seeks to convey meaning --in part, through logical and syntactical structures, including the linearity associated with print media-- cannot be easily abandoned by even the most ardent proponents of poststructuralism and decentered hypertexts. More broadly, "Hypertext Notes" itself stands as an example of *both* paradigms operating helpfully side-by-side. My large point is that instead of accepting the either/ or between modernism and postmodernism enjoined upon us by many postmodern enthusiasts --we as theorists, authors, and readers of hypertexts will be better served by a theory of hypertext which explicitly acknowledges the role of both paradigms. [line 863] The opening page of "Hypertext Notes" announces its function as something of an experiment. The author explicitly states, "My purpose is to exploit the medium of hypertext in a way that is only rarely done, especially on the web, in order to make some points about a wide variety of aspects of digital text." Obviously, the author intends to convey multiple meanings to his audience: not everything is left up to the reader. The author must further explain to the reader the semiotics and the structure of "Hypertext Notes." We have to know what all those interesting but baffling ISO characters at the top of the page *mean* in this context if we are to navigate this hypertext, and so the author obligingly --but also out of necessity for our understanding as readers-- tells us: they are the link markers that will take us somewhere, though the *order* of our journey is left up to us. Indeed, the author explicitly states, "...I have intentionally chosen symbols as independent of order as ISO characters will allow so as to avoid imposing my own order onto the text." This seems to be integral to the author's larger project for his readers: Make what you will of this essay. I've intentionally avoided explicitly outlining the manner in which this document is written --it's a kind of a *puzzle or tapestry* which can be put together on several levels, for example what I'm saying and why I'm saying it this way. The work is different every time it's read, and I suppose the meaning varies. In some ways this kind of a document seems unfathomable, *maybe because of how we've been trained to read, and trained to think*. http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/v6n3/ andersen/zdog.html This certainly sounds respectably postmodern. In particular, the effort to avoid "imposing" one's own order may be seen as an admirable respect for the reader's autonomy of choice, as it ostensibly allows the reader to create his/ her own structure or reading of the available lexia (text units). But it should be equally clear by now that this effort to avoid imposing order is only partial. The author *has* chosen for his readers a limited set of lexia, linked in specific ways, accompanied by an opening set of instructions which tell us the overarching meaning of this hypertext --a meaning defined by its purposes (to exploit the medium and "to make some points" about digital text), its navigational signals, and its structure. Over against the possiblity of navigating the linked lexia in different ways --the texts within the lexia, beginning with the carefully articulated instructions, are themselves robustly linear, and the links themselves often constitute a linear, indeed logical connection between the elements of thought, the claims and propositions, contained within the lexia. [line 911] In these ways, the author has retained to a considerable degree the modernist paradigm: the hypertext still stands as an effort by an author to convey meaning to an audience, and part of this project includes the familiar elements of logical and syntactical structures, including linearity. My point is *not* that the author has thereby failed in his apparently postmodern project. Rather, it seems that any hypertext constructed by an author for an audience *must* include these elements of the modernist paradigm. Otherwise, why offer one's hypertext to an audience who will hopefully understand at least part of what one *means*? It might be thought that I'm making an obvious point: of course postmodern hypertexts cannot abandon wholesale every element of modern conceptions of the author attempting to convey meaning to an audience. If this is an obvious point, however, it is not one suggested within the hypertext itself. Rather, the author specifically calls into question linear argument: "This [preservation of linear structure in hypertexts] may well be because it is the most suitable form. But what if it isn't? What if discursive texts do not need the structure of an 'argument'?..." [line 932] http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/v6n3/archive/ andersen/zprune.html The suggestion seems to be here the typically postmodern one --that we *can* abandon modern concepts entirely, including the notion of linear argument. Let me emphasize here that at least some members of the philosophical community are indeed quite excited and interested in the potential of hypertext to open up at least *alternative* forms of argument. Perhaps the best known of these, David Kolb, has in fact argued that hypertexts will make possible the *recovery* of argument forms (e.g., Hegel's dialectic) which are only awkwardly expressed in the (largely) linear frameworks of print. But if hypertexts open up the possibility of discovering (or recovering) forms of argument only awkwardly articulated in print --in our rush to abandon linear argument, we run the danger of abandoning a body of knowledge which, in my view, has much to teach us still regarding what makes for a valid and sound argument, in contrast with what may be simply persuasive but ill-grounded. In point of fact, the author's essay inadvertently confirms this fear in at least one instance. The author's rhetorical suggestion that discursive texts do not need the structure of an argument is ostensibly supported by a link to quotes from Bolter's _Writing Space_. The author writes: Bolter says the writer of hypertext designates these signs in the act of creating connections. The reader is left to make choices more than ever before --*an argument is no longer a linear statement* of "Here's what I think and this is why I think it, 1-2-3-4," and instead puts the burden of responsibility more than ever before on the reader to make the connections-- as if to say "Here's a map, the sites are clearly marked --now where would you like to go." The specific textual experience that was a tour bus had turned into a lone hitchhiker with a backpack. Go where you wanna go, do what you wanna do. What you put into the experience, what you put into your brain, what you put into your "trip," is what you will get out of it. The spirit of manipulative propaganda may live on in the text, but it must become more sophisticated if it is to thrive. [line 970] http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/v6n3/archive/ andersen/zcat.html#choices How are we to read this link? Is this itself an *argument* about what argument in hypertextual documents *is*? If it *is* an argument --it is a fallacious one. At best, what's at stake here is Bolter's (admittedly considerable status as an) authority regarding hypertext. But it should hardly take a logician to point out that accepting a claim (that we do not *need* the linear structures of argument) on the strength of an appeal to an authority (who simply states that linear argument is no longer to be found in hypertextual media) is not a logically satisfying move. Rather, as students learn in their elementary logic course, this is an example of a fallacious argument, usually referred to as appeal to authority. To be blunt: *if* these linked lexia are intended to constitute an example of an alternative hypertextual argument, they unfortunately read as fallacious argument as well. This apparent logical weakness is not unique to "Hypertext Notes." Rather, it turns out that the postmodern tendency to abandon the ostensibly confining restrictions of linearity and linear argument quickly become mired in a fatal series of contradictions. Again, my point is not to trumpet the victory of modernity over the postmodern. Rather, it is to urge us, on the occasion of the "Hypertext Notes" experiment, to recognize more clearly how our hypertexts represent a theoretical mix of both modern and postmodern elements. If "Hypertext Notes" succeeds --as I believe it does-- as an interesting and fruitful experiment in hypertext, I would argue it succeeds precisely because it conjoins modernist notions of the author-reader relationship, linear argument, etc., with a postmodern interest in exploring the nonlinear possibilities of hypertext and the role of the reader in constructing his or her path through the lexia offered by the author. By exploring this conjunction more explicitly --by examining carefully how the modern and postmodern elements work together to create rich experiences of authoring and reading-- I believe we will make progress towards a more complete, consistent, and useful theory of hypertext. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Charles Ess Drury College dru001d@vma.smsu.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------- [ This essay in Volume 6, Number 3 of _EJournal_ (August, ] [ 1996) is (c) copyright _EJournal_. Permission is hereby ] [ granted to give it away. _EJournal_ hereby assigns any and ] [ all financial interest to C. Ess. 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