11: Hypertext 1

Table of contents

1. Review
2. Hypertext reading
   1. Example 1: What is Book?
   2. Example 2: What is a Text?
3. Hypertext writing
   1. Barthes
   2. Foucault
      1. Example 1
      2. Example 2
   3. Landow and the possibilities of hypertext writing

Review

Last class we focused on the frustrations that digital pioneers were having with the print medium.

In general we tried to look at ways that the medium was limiting or constraining the way we experienced a text.

Speaking generally, we focused on three main features:

• access immediacy, selection, and curation (Bush)
• interconnectivity (Bush and Nelson)
• non-linearity or multi-sequence (Neslon)

As part of our review let me pose an opening discussion question.

Today I’d like to continue this discussion of the limiting effects of the print medium by looking at a few more articles from another group of thinkers with a different background. Not only did the printed text feel constraining to computer and internet pioneers, but it also felt limiting to a group of thinkers often referred to as “post-structuralists”, which includes thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.

Landow’s book Hypertext is informed by the concerns of these thinkers and his excitement about the new affordances of the digital medium. We will look at two of his chapters focused on reading and writing respectively, and, during our consideration of hypertext writing, look at two essays by Barthes and Foucault on the nature of authorship.

Hypertext reading

At the outset it would be good for us to simply clarify what Landow has in mind by a “hypertext”, how it differs from a non-hypertext, and why he thinks this is a positive technological innovation.

Finally, Landow again seems to note how our language is inherited from our familiarity with a previous medium. But just like the word “send” was changed by the telegraph, so words like “book” and “text” require a new meaning. At the same time, old words and old meanings threaten (through “paradigmatic regression”) to limit our imagination of a possible future.

In the section beginning on p. 82, Landow discusses how the terms “read, write, and text” as so heavily infused with the paradigm of the print medium that using them in a hypertext environment inevitably distorts their meaning and creates ambiguity.

He writes:

“Terms so implicated with print technology necessarily confuse unless handled with great care.” (See p. 82)

Let’s briefly consider the two examples he gives.

Example 1: What is Book?

Example 2: What is a Text?

Hypertext writing

Let’s turn now to a consideration of writing in the age of hypertext. First let’s begin with a discussion of the “primary source” articles by Barthes and Foucault. Here I have a few questions for each article.

Barthes

Foucault

Example 1

Let me try to offer one concrete example of where I think Barthes’ and Foucault’s idea – that the “author” is more than a mere writer, but also a form of privilege, power, and control – has constrained social imagination and prevented the realization of genuine possibilities. Further, in this example, we can see how the notion of a hypertext and collaborative composition – where the “author” get lost or fades to the background – is a large part of what finally allowed this possibility to be realized.

The example I have in mind is Wikipedia. The article, The Hive in the Atlantic relates the story of Wikipedia’s surprising success.

As the story goes, Wikipedia’s creation and success was an accident. The original goal was to build Nupedia, an online encyclopedia. But Nupedia was conceived along the lines of a paper encyclopedia, where the limits of the medium made collaborative composition difficult and likewise make the idea iterative updates and revisions impossible.

Thus the original vision expected that articles would be assigned to Authors — single individuals with “credentialed” names that would function as a source of social authority for the article. (Consider: Why I should trust this article? Because it was written by this Author not just any “writer”).

The articles states:

“There was simply no question in his mind that Nupedia would be guided by a board of experts, that submissions would be largely written by experts, and that articles would be published only after extensive peer review. Sanger set about recruiting academics to work on Nupedia.”

But as the article relates, Nupedia failed.

“Then there was the real problem: production. Sanger and the Nupedia board had worked out a multistage editorial system that could have been borrowed from any scholarly journal. In a sense, it worked: assignments were made, articles were submitted and evaluated, and copyediting was done. But, to both Wales and Sanger, it was all much too slow.”

Why do you think it was so slow? How might the ideas of power and authority that we associate with the “author function” be slowing down the work of contributors and the peer-review process?

Similarly, why the might the inability to think of the text as a container for a series of smaller text chunks have prevented collaboration and slowed the process?

Wikipedia was then invented “on the side”, originally intended to be “quick” (Wiki being the Hawaiian word for “quick”) entries that could help speed up the progress of Nupedia. But why was it so quick? How did the idea of “text chunks” connected via hyperlink and the “death of the author” contribute to this quickness?

Because individual contributions could be linked together, anyone could contribute any amount. Authorship became collaborative, effectively destroying the associations of power, authority, and prestige that are normally associated with the “author”.

And stripped of these “author functions”, people felt free to make contributions quickly, in small (connectable) chunks, and without the unrealizable expectations that society expects of the “author genius”.

As the article notes, the speed and scale with which Wikipedia outpaced Nupedia was astonishing.

The initial purpose was to get the public to add entries that would then be “fed into the Nupedia process” of authorization. Most of Nupedia’s expert volunteers, however, wanted nothing to do with this, so Sanger decided to launch a separate site called “Wikipedia.” Neither Sanger nor Wales looked on Wikipedia as anything more than a lark. This is evident in Sanger’s flip announcement of Wikipedia to the Nupedia discussion list. “Humor me,” he wrote. “Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” And, to Sanger’s surprise, go they did. Within a few days, Wikipedia outstripped Nupedia in terms of quantity, if not quality, and a small community developed. In late January, Sanger created a Wikipedia discussion list (Wikipedia-L) to facilitate discussion of the project. At the end of January, Wikipedia had seventeen “real” articles (entries with more than 200 characters). By the end of February, it had 150; March, 572; April, 835; May, 1,300; June, 1,700; July, 2,400; August, 3,700. At the end of the year, the site boasted approximately 15,000 articles and about 350 “Wikipedians.”

Example 2

Landow gives his own example to support Foucault’s notion that “author” means more than mere “writer”, but is laden with social ideas about “power” and “authority” which affects how a society and culture operates.

On p. 139, Landow reports that an anecdote about how the University of British Columbia refused to consider co-authored works for promotion.

Here we might ask, in the manner of Foucault, is the university merely “responding” to some natural idea about the important independent genius of the author (Authors = “individuals” who individually write books)? Or conversely, is the institution itself helping to construct the idea of authorship, defining the rules of when someone gets to be counted as an “author” and when a textual work ought to count as being an “authored work” (with all the prestige and importance that this implies)?

Landow writes:

“but now I wish to point out that as scholars from McLuhan and Eisenstein to Ede and Lunsford have long argued, book technology and the attitudes it supports are the institutions most responsible for maintaining exaggerated notions of authorial individuality, uniqueness, and ownership that often drastically falsify the conception of original contributions in the humanities and convey distorted pictures of research.” (p. 140)

This quotation introduces evaluative language (“exaggerated”, “falsify”, “distorted”). The suggestion is that the idea of authorship that our institutions and dominant media construct are not harmless, but have an effect on our ability to accurately see the world.

So, here we might ask:

One answer among many might be…

Book technologies (and supporting institutions) that construct or perpetuate the idea of the isolated author have produced corresponding reward systems. Scholars looking to get jobs, keep jobs, and get promotions then must play into this game.

The result is a “publishing mill” that generates, at best, redundancy, and more likely, a lot of nonsense.

Considering this study which suggests (not without controversy and disagreement) that “nearly 90% of papers in academic journals are never cited”. While this number may be high, it suggests that much of what “authors” are producing to keep their jobs and get promoted is never read or used.

At the same consider how these same evaluation and promotion standards might be devaluing other kinds of valuable knowledge activities; perhaps more dialogical activities like teaching, dialogue, public lecturing, collaborative projects, translation, editing of primary texts, etc.

Another example might be the way sole authorship creates an exaggerated idea of property, i.e. intellectual property, which negatively affects future research progress. As “ideas” are transformed into property, laws of property begin to control and exclude how others might absorb and use these, once common, but now privately owned ideas. (See Landow, bottom of pg. 140)

Hypertext authorship often challenges or complicates this.

For example: Is it possible to see this conflict in the construction of our own class annotations on articles, many of which are technically still in copyright?

Our annotations are tethered to the anchoring text, but at the same time our annotations are not the property of the original author.

However, if we remove the underlying article, our annotations are less powerful and meaningful. As hypertext writers become co-dependent, do we also become co-owners? Or conversely, do copyright laws end up privileging one kind of writing, while diminishing or threatening another form.

In general, I would say intellectual property laws do not handle these new situations well, precisely because they have been invented for a world where one kind of writing was dominant. Now that a new technology has emerged where a new kind of writing is possible, we find that these laws are not adapting well to the new context. (We will see this issue of copyright and intellectual property emerge again when we read Lessig later in the semester.)

Landow and the possibilities of hypertext writing

Finally let’s end with just a little bit of reflection on what hypertext writing might look like according to Landow.