After class last night and going over Bolter again, I was struck by Bolter’s very short discussion of typography in Chapter 4. He asserts that, “the computer window recalls the page in a printed book, which is also a stack of two dimensional planes”; however, one can reorganize windows–both reading space and writing space–within the frame of the computer screen to one’s own liking and needs, leading the reader to engage in both visual and verbal modes of reading (67-68).

I don’t feel like I have any really clear or deep thoughts, but I feel like there is more to this. Not only can we personalize our desktops, but we can personalize nearly everything out the windows we use–whether we’re reading from Word, email, the web, etc. There’s only so much a reader can do with the actual structure of a book–break the spine, bend the corners of pages down (to this day, I feel guilty about doing this because a teacher in second grade told me that it kills fairies!), write in the margins.

Bolter says that there’s no one configuration of hypertext that can reproduce the same professional, pleasing element of the printed word, that it’s the shifting configurations, the movement that makes meaning in hypertext (68). Even with this moment, we all have preferred ways of viewing hypertext. I read anything that’s text heavy in Safari because it’s easier to magnify, but I use Firefox for Twitter and Facebook. The way i shift my windows, my hypertext pages falls into patterns, just like the way I read books. I can’t magnify the text in a printed book with a subtle movement of my fingers, but I can look for a different edition.

I wonder what it means. Do we carry our print reading habits to the computer, to guide and/or possibly restrict our mode of reading here? Can we pretty seamlessly switch between the two because they mirror each other in some ways? Just some thoughts…

Bolter made me think about my relationships with books and different types of digital/multimodal texts. What does a book mean to me? Do multimodal texts (e-book, webpages, e-potrfolios, e-essays, blogs, discussion boards, wikis) mean the same to me? After our class discussions on advantages of multimodal texts, one might think that “real” books are doomed. I would disagree if someone would make such an assumption.
First of all, a little bit on the concept of “materiality”:
Production of books was the first attempt to make texts “material”. In this course, we have talked a lot about materiality of texts in digital era. It seem to me that it is a different type of materiality though. Multimodal texts, or hypertexts with all their graphics, links, images, video and audio aids, are more expressive which makes them more noticeable, attachable, hence, more material. But, when we talk about books it is a physical materiality. I do not see how digitally produced texts, or in Bolter’s discussion, e-books, can have same materiality. You can’t touch them, you can’t smell them, you can’t feel them when you put them under your pillow when you are tired of reading and finally ready to fall asleep. (Personally,I love reading before going to bed. It always makes me feel that my day is more complete.I don’t usually read of my computer before I go to bed. It is just not my style. =) Plus, I think it is simply uncomfortable.)
Secondly, books have a symbolic meaning attached to them in our culture which I do not see in e-books in particular and digitally produced texts in general.(Maybe, the time will pass, and people would say similar things about e-books. But, time definitely has to pass a little more.) Again, we can still touch them physically, whereas the digital texts are still available for us only through visual perception. There is something about that “touchy” aspect, that makes me never let “real” books be substituted with “unreal” e-books, or e-articles, e-essays, e-portfolios, websites and so on. I belong to those, who tends to construct their reality through sense of touch, by “flagging” their spaces.
We talk about how expressive and vivid the digitally produced forms of the texts are. Books’ forms (not the content) have that too and even more. Think about your favorite book on your bookshelf in your house. You will always recognize it among others: the color and the texture of it’s binding, the thickness, the size of it. Books still give us something that digital texts cannot. It is the symbolism attached to the books themselves: the smell of the pages, the weight, texture of the cover, rustle of the pages, someone’s handwriting on the edges. Think about a book that you borrow from the library for example. Each book, like a person, has it’s own story to tell: who red it, what kind of notes that person left on the edges, what they were looking for. These stories of the books themselves, not the stories they cary in them, make their personalities, more dear and intimate to our hearts.

[Forgive me, but I'm not feeling the clever title this week.]

There are a couple of things about this week’s chapters that jumped out at me as being interesting. The first happened in Chapter 4, “The Breakout of the Visual,” when Bolter talks about the desktop GUI and the metaphor that organizes it–which is the business office. The user interface of our computers is based on and around an office, so we have files and trashcans and folders and directories functioning as the icons by which we navigate our computers. That metaphor caught my attention, and I spent a little time wondering what would have happened if the folks designing and coding those original GUIs had chosen a different organizing metaphor. What would have changed, and what would have stayed the same, if the original GUIs had been based on a library metaphor? On a classroom metaphor? On a kitchen metaphor, or a forest metaphor, or a farm metaphor? I admit, I’m getting a little silly, but how would we change the ways we work with and think about computers if, I don’t know, we thought of a tree as the organizing metaphor for the GUI–would the individual sets of data we call files be leaves? Would the folders be branches or trunks? Would we discard files and have them “fall” to the bottom of the screen?

…I would swear this train of thought made more sense in my head. Onward, then, to my other moment of hey-that’s-interesting, which happened in Chapter 5, “The Electronic Book,” during Bolter’s discussion of the encyclopedia and the library and the ways in which these forms are remediated by cyberspace. He points to search engines as way in which we index the web, the way an index works in a book or an encyclopedia–search engines, then, as a way of imposing order and hierarchy on chaos.

But what do we do with the fact that the search engines aren’t independent or neutral, but are owned by companies or corporations seeking to make a profit? What do we do with the fact that Google (for example) is perfectly willing to work with the government in China to block certain search terms and pages, and is also willing to give a higher place or precedence to sites that pay for that privilege? Or the fact that Google sells ads whose content are based on the search terms and results one plugs in?

On the one hand, this doesn’t seem too much different than an editor imposing his or her own ideas on what topics are worth including in an encyclopedia, right? On the other, the way search engines handle themselves is made to seem so transparent that many people don’t even think about the ways in which the companies that own those search engines are handling their search algorithms, and I can’t but think that it is different, and possibly even more insidious.

As I was reading Bolter’s book, I noticed that he mentions the “Trash Can” (62).  Does anybody know when it changed to the Recycle Bin?  That is a more accurate description of how the process works anyway, but does anyone know when that changed?

In his chapter on the electronic book, Bolter writes “Readers will look to the web for information, and if they cannot find it there and are not willing to look elsewhere, then cyberspace may become by default the universal book, encyclopedia, and library, all in one” (96).  I couldn’t help thinking of my students as I read this section.  All too often I have heard them claim “I can’t find anything on x topic.”  But what they are really telling me is “I looked on the internet and couldn’t find what I needed so it must not be out there.”  While I think the internet is an excellent research tool and that computers, databases and search engines have made finding information faster, easier and in many cases more immediate, it does have some limitations which are easy to overlook.

The misconception that EVERYTHING is on the internet seems to be pervasive, among my students, at least.  And it would be great if it were true, it really disadvantages them in this late age of print.  Since we are still transitioning from print to digital, many resources are still not widely available on the internet.  (I am thinking particularly of older texts, works of fiction, art, etc.)  I find it a struggle to get students to use the library for my class, and many don’t seem to see the need to look at hard copies of texts when so much information, including reputable books and journals, is available digitally.  And I don’t want to deny them practice with research in a digital environment, but I am troubled, from a research perspective that they seem unwilling to look for sources that are not only available but the best fit for their research needs.  It may be that what they need is all available digitally, but since, as Bolter points out, even most contemporary research is still published in print rather than digitally and online, I find that to be highly unlikely at this point.

What seems to be missing is an ability to reflect on and evaluate the sources and information they have found, not for credibility, but for usefulness of information.  As I write this I am thinking about those commercials for Bing about search overload, where two people are conversing and one spits out random information that connects to key words the other person says. (See video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSkaTcjDIMk).   Bolter talks about text overload, but I also wonder about search overload, where we can find so much, we lose our ability to weed through it all.

So I am looking for suggestions as to how to bridge these two worlds of information.  How can I encourage students to do research more fully—to find not only what is available but what really suits their needs without seeming to favor one form or another?  I want to show students that research is really topic and needs based and to accept that some topics will need more digitally available texts than others, but I also want to be sure that digital texts don’t become the default because they are more immediately available.  (At least until we reach the point where EVERYTHING is indeed available on the internet.)

Though I am thoroughly enjoying the Bolter text–I think there are several brilliant nuggets–I find that in his discussions of print text and web text, he omits a very important genre: comic books and graphic novels. I find myself irked over his use of the term “conventional printed books.” What exactly his definition of conventional printed books? He obviously does not include advertising or magazines as a conventional printed book (66), but that would make sense, because such documents are not generally considered “books.” I’m thinking of when I worked at Barnes and Noble–magazines were very separate from books (labeled “newsstand”). However, graphic novels are, at least at Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million, found in the “book” section of bookstores. Because Bolter never really defines a conventional text–is it a mass market? a trade paperback? a hardcover book? an over-sized text? a graphic novel? anything that is bound over “x” amount of pages–I am left confounded when he writes “the layout of a book is as conservative as the choice of fonts appropriate to the book” (66). I don’t mean to quibble, but since technically graphic novels are housed in the book section, I would argue that the decisions made into creating graphic novel texts are anything but conservative. The layout of a graphic novel can be quite creative, as panel size, shape, location all plays a role, as does art, coloring, captions, and caption font (among others).

Along these lines, I find it interesting that Bolter bemoans the loss of the marginal note. He writes “Marginal notes told readers what to look for and provided constant support in the task…but in banishing the notes, modern printers have sacrificed both the immediacy of reference and the sense of visual and intellectual context that marginal notes provided to their medieval readers” (67). While again, he probably is referring to that blasted “conventional printed book” (and I am guessing that Bolter is not really thinking of graphic novels as conventional–but he never makes this distinction), it occurred to me that comic book captions serve the same purpose (to some extent, at least) as the marginal notes Bolter describes. While captions can serve multiple purposes, one such purpose is to inform readers what is in store for them–particularly the caption found on the splash page (the page with the title, creators, and artists/scripter/etc.). So in some ways, at least, the marginal note is still alive and well today. The caption does not dominate the graphic novel or comic book text as the images or dialogue balloons do, but they still serve an important purpose. Additionally, silent film inner-titles serve the same purpose as marginal notes as well (though Silent Film is not a printed, bound text).

It seems odd that comic books and graphic novels would be omitted from Bolter’s text. Comics, illustrated novels, and so forth have, I’d argue, really informed the layout decisions made on the web today. And comics, though still a relatively new genre, has been around long before the advent of the web.

Just some thoughts for this week!

I was going back through the readings this week to catch up on my blog posts and master procrastinator that I am, decided to review through some of the optional readings first. I discovered the optional reading that was assigned for week 10, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t taken advantage of this resource. Admittedly, I am no expert in hypertexts, but the design of Madeline Sorapure’s webtext was so clean and intuitive that I spend a good few minutes navigating through it and ran out of time to read it! I wanted to reference it here though, because it would have been a really good example to use in the reading facilitation last week.  While the authors referenced Brent’s hypertext, Sorapure’s (and I am guessing that her text came after the articles assigned for reading this week) is an excellent example of a hypertext that meets many of the assessment criteria that we as a class decided upon. Long story short, if anyone is interested in hypertexts that are (seemingly) perfect, I’d recommend visiting the link on our course schedule to Sorapure’s text. One thing that I did notice, as I truly spent some time exploring Sorapure’s text, was that she credits ABC with the code used for her hypertext. This is something that I have heard (copying code), but I don’t quite understand. How does one copy and paste code? How does one acquire permission to use/augment code? Do you need permission? Do we cite code as we would direct quotations? Just some thoughts/questions.

Moving on to something I did read in full….In the Moran and Herrington article they offer an interesting analogy that I found myself spending some time considering when thinking about traditional essays versus hypertexts: “Those who argue for school uniforms say that such a policy will help students concentrate on academics and not on dress. Given our experience here, we can imagine a similar argument for the traditional, paper-based essay” (251). Being firmly planted on the anti-uniform side of this repetitive freshman paper topic, while the analogy is in some ways a bit cautionary, I found it to actually be an encouraging comparison that make me want to use hypertexts in my classroom–they are the anti-uniform, they encourage self-expression, originality, etc.–if we are to accept this analogy of course! (And I think it’s a rather good one.)

One of the issues that I ran into with this week’s readings was indeed an issue of self-expression and originality. As the articles discusses assessment, they often also discussed color choices, style selections, etc. I was mildly concerned that as begin to break down the hypertext into multiple genres and then begin to develop standards for those genres, are we going to turn hypertext genres into “uniforms” also? I suspect the answer is eventually, yes. However, I also suspect that by that time, or at least in the future, as technology advances, there will constantly be genres that precede assessment “rubrics”–this is something that draws me to digital compositions, and I hope that they will constantly and continually be evolving so that the uniform makers just can’t manage to keep up.

Over the course of this semester the thing that has most surprised me has been the way that I apply processes of alphabetic composing (especially invention and pre writing) to my digital composing processes. I literally outlined my first website design and then visually mapped the layout before ever opening Dreamweaver. Because of this, when reading the Selfe et al. piece for week 9, the initial mapping of familiar practices involved in audio and video composing that began this chapter was not altogether surprising to me. However, this chapter did get me thinking about the challenges, as an instructor and even as a student, that the differences between alphabetic and digital compositions can pose. (I am jumping ahead here, but I think the most startling challenge of these digital compositions that struck me was in the readings a week or two after this that actual give an outrageous editing translation for video compositions a minute of video was equivalent to an outrageous amount of editing time, YICKES!) However, Selfe outlines several student challenges (which very quickly translate into instructor challenges as well), like topic selection, equipment usage/functions/language, inexperience with digital documentation, specialized language, distribution, storage, access, and an entirely new system of grammar (17-8). This list was rather daunting, and I was surprised by the simple things that slipped my mind, like topic selection, that were referenced as challenges with working with students who are composing audio or video projects. That said, I was particularly grateful for this chapter, as I do foresee myself eventually using audio and/or video mediums in a classroom setting—what a disaster I would be in for without a forewarning to be prepared! Another thing that I liked about this piece was that the assignment examples were from a first year composition classroom. While I’m not a huge fan of using assignments that haven’t originated from my own direct interactions with my students, I think that if (when) I do attempt to bring these digital composing assignments into my classroom, I will be revisiting these sample assignments to guide me through the process of creating assignments that will strive to result in students’ successes.

This year is the first time that I’ve been introduced to many composition/rhetoric/computers and writing scholars, and I have continuously been impressed by publications that have the name of either Selfe attached. Their texts/articles are so well organized, thorough, and perhaps the most basic praise, helpful.  This chapter in particular is something that I think students should be given access to as well. I think that as much as this text is informative for an instructor, it would be informative for a student as well.

What interests me most about both the Bolter and the Hawisher et al. examinations of computers and computer-mediated writing is the predictions that the writers make about how computers will change society and writing. Both books want to predict rapid social changes and slow technological advances… but the way things played out, and are continuing to play out, it’s the technology that keeps advancing at lightspeed, and the social changes are lagging behind. Bolter suggests that no one is going to read a computer in bed, but that computers and digital technology will cause us to rethink and reexamine our culturally-held notions of what it means to read and write. Well, I can not only read my computer in bed, I can read novels from my computer screen wherever I want… but many of the textual conventions of printed text remain static on the computer screen. Texts are still written, and read, in linear form, and as readers of hypertext, we resist the “wall of text” and ask for smaller “pages” of text. Students who are referred to hypertexts often only read the page that is in front of them, and don’t click the links to explore (much like they don’t read the footnotes or endnotes on a piece of print). So I wonder, really, whether digital technology is going to outstrip the process of remediation.

(There’s some thought here about web and web 2.0 remediating web 1.0 processes, but I haven’t quite managed to sort it out in my own head yet.)

[belated posting from week 10's readings here]

I’ve been pondering last week’s readings off and on since our class discussion and rubric exercise, especially as I’ve been working on commenting on student drafts and reading a variety of different texts on my own. The whole question of what we look at when we’re assessing a piece of text has made me hyperconscious of the different modalities of the things I’m reading or consuming. One thing I’m starting to question is whether it really is fair to offer two forms of the same assignment to students, as suggested in some of our readings. Is it really fair to offer students the chance to do either a multimodal or hypertext version of an assignment, or the option to do a traditional print version of the same assignment? Are they even really the same assignment at all, given that they’ll probably end up requiring such different approaches and skills from the students who complete them? Can you really assess apples and oranges in equivalent ways?

I’m starting to think that in my own curriculum design, I would prefer to stay away from offering assignments that offer different ways of completing the assignment. Instead, I think it would be better to simply do a variety of assignments–some traditional, some multimodal, some specifically hypertext or hypermedia. That, I think, would be a little closer to being fair–maybe some students would be more comfortable with a traditional print essay, while others would have a lot of fun with the multimodal and hypertext assignments. There would be, in other words, a little something for everyone, and I wouldn’t be stuck trying to figure out how to weight a print essay against a hypertext one.