Hi Guys! I guess you thought I forgot about you. Not a chance. I am a little concerned about the date on my site. Today is Tuesday, March 4 so I’m sure why the site says it is March 5. Anyway. . .
Anybody get the feeling that hypertext is the next wave in promoting Academic Anarchy? Can you imagine students actually responding to literature, adding to it and creating their own stuff? Can you imagine the author not being able to keep control of his or her original work because someone else might change it? I’d like to say this is so OBVIOUS that it is not worth discussing, but it wasn’t obvious to me at all. In fact, the first four chapters were actually very fascinating. (Surprise!) So here’s the questions that you’ve all been waiting for:
First, what do you think that the impact of this technology will have on the power that academia, especially English professors currently hold in the areas of literature and writing. What kind of influence will they have if the only thing necessary to become a creative writer is the ability to “creative” “write”? Also, in literature classes, back in the day, professors used to spend a lot of time explaining interpretations of certain works of literature. Only very motivated students would take the time to go to the library, read the journals, and other reference material to see if those interpretations could be refuted. Now with hypertext, the interpretations and refutations might very well be located right next to the text. How will this affect the way that professors will now teach literature?
Second, there were some terms that I didn’t understand. What is a “TrackBack”? What is a “card metaphor”? What is “binarity”? What is a “Borghesian Alpha”? What is a “rhizome”?
Third, if students are going to be using hypertext as part of their literature study, what reading strategies do we need to teach them in order for them to be able to read the text and navigate the text effectively? What about the desacralization of texts like Great Expectations or any of the other texts in the canon? Will the canon texts now be used less in favor of text that are not on hypertext?
Fourth, how d o we reach the “Deep Web”? ( Is that anything like the “Deep Magic” in the Chronicles of Narnia?) Seriously, it seems that all the good stuff is there. I know I’ve often tried to get copies if the Courier Post online, but can’t do it. I know that old versions exist because I remember seeing them on microfilm, but maybe they do exist in the “Deep Web”. How do we get there?
Fifth, and how about Foucault? I don’t know about you guys, but I really never liked Foucault. He always very dull and difficult to understand, but Landow’s discussion of Foucault’s networking as having no top and no bottom actually made sense to me. What do you think?
Sixth, how about this quote from Derrida found on page 113? “. . . Writing must thus return to being what it should never have ceased to be: an accessory, an accident, an excess.” How about that as a writing prompt for next year’s HSPA? What do you think about that?
Seventh (I KNOW, I was supposed to stop at 5, but I want to get this one in.) Hypertext lends itself to collaboration, but are there going to be problems deciding who gets the credit? Also, at what point does “collaboration” become “plagiarism”?
Hypertext does have the ability to turn academia on its head. In allowing teachers the freedom to be coaches and authors the opportunity to be editors and self-publishers, hypertext does seem to promote the team mentality so important in business and industry today. (page, 143). If so, it is easy for me to understand why there is an energy in hypertext that doesn’t exist in printed books. Hopefully, it’s not too hard to learn. 
I wanted to bring your attention to a social bookmarking project that would be accomplished by librarians. BTW the ISEN logo was designed by the same fellow who did the movie posters for The Chronicles of Narnia, Darren Strecker.
Here is the ISEN summary:
You know how the ISBN is assigned to books. Over 1 million books are assigned ISBNs each year. What we plan to do is emulate that system for databases. We would assign over 1 million databases ISEN or Internet Search Environment Numbers once the system is in place in its first year. There may be as many as 5 million in the backlog for cataloging by a social nework of librarians. Life Science databases would be cataloged by life science librarians, law resources by law librarians, etc… Then we’d create a database of databases or search engine only for databases. Your hit list would only be databases instead of PDF files, Blog postings and random HTML files. We pull out the databases. The hits you get would be the interface to databases which provides access to upwards of 500 to 650 times the amount of information available on the “surface web” indexed by the major search engines. ISEN reveals the what is called the “deep web”.