Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 389.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (74)
Subject: what's interesting about Web pages?
[2] From: "Price, Dan" <dprice@tui.edu> (138)
Subject: RE: 13.0387 what's interesting about Web pages
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2000 19:49:00 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: what's interesting about Web pages?
When I asked the question, "What's interesting about Web pages?", I had in
mind the moving target of students' abilities and was wondering out loud
toward what it was moving. In his long and helpful contribution, Patrick
Rourke details several technical criteria, which are focused on emerging
standards and robustness of code, and mentions some graphic design
features. Francois Lachance pays attention to "the transactional nature of
the encounter with cognitive artefacts", i.e. to genuine communication.
(And when does THAT happen, even face-to-face???? Remember what Paul had to
say on the subject....) Johanna Drucker speaks about the frontiers of the
online archive.
Understanding the trajectory of this moving target is important to me for
immediate pedagogical reasons. Each year the average level of technological
knowledge and ability of our incoming students increases. This year, for
example, a number of them managed to get through some exercises in 1/4th of
the allotted time -- and that allotment was based on the performance of the
students from the year before. As a result the emphasis of instruction
needs to shift from learning the basic ABCs, as it were, to the skills of
putting the letters together -- and, yes, this means both the linguistic
and the graphic skills. In consequence I am forced to ask, what are those
skills, and how do I teach them?
The technical. Merely writing any old HTML that produces some reasonable
effect on screen clearly isn't good enough, and many of the students
already know how to do that. If they don't, Microsoft Word or some other
such tool will do it for them. Bad practice automatically! Thus Patrick
Rourke's points about standards and other issues of robustness. The
equivalent of Latin prose composition? There's also Javascript, though in
our experience that is too demanding, i.e. demands too much of the year to
get across successfully.
Design. Basic principles of graphic design, layout, typography etc are not
difficult to present. Symmetrical vs asymmetrical balance &c. Anything more
ambitious begins to require talent and technical skills that are best left
to those who are in professional training as page designers, I'd guess.
Design also, however, verges on and overlaps with my next category.
Rhetoric of communication. How does a page catch your attention AND
persuade you to continue looking at it, taking in what it has to say? How
is your attention shaped and managed? Partly this has to do with graphic
design, but when that is kept at a simple level, what emerges most
prominently are the issues of identity and navigation. By "identity" I mean
how the page identifies itself as suitable for, attractive to a particular
audience. By "navigation" I mean how the reader is orientated and how his
or her attention is directed from one item to the next.
Reference. This is a subdivision of rhetoric, I suppose, and particularly
relevant to the academic audience. How does the page refer to supporting
materials and evidence? We can and do mimic the footnote and the selected
quotation, but when referenced data can be brought to screen (a.k.a. "live"
data), then the situation changes fundamentally. The obvious danger is that
the reader will get lost in the flood of evidence, either distracted or
simply overwhelmed; when as author you want your reader to try other
possibilities than those you present is a real question.
Argument. Strictly speaking, the skills of argumentation are not our
business in humanities computing, but we simply cannot depend on the
schools to have taught these skills, and in many cases the students will
only be beginning to learn some of them in other courses, if at all. So
some elements we do have to get across, and it would be useful to know
about a Strunk-and-White of basic argumentation. What is our business, it
seems to me, is teaching those skills as they are modified by the amounts
and kinds of evidence provided by online sources. Who knows what to do with
sources of evidence too massive to read through, e.g. the Web? Many of our
colleagues "solve" this problem by dismissing the Web altogether, but
whatever value the contents may have -- many values, actually -- the Web
does present us with a representative situation it seems to me the coming
generations of students have to know how to cope with. Clearly, then, we
also need to get into basic skills of doing online research -- following of
clues, query-construction, the various kinds of search engines (e.g.
Altavista vs Google), sampling.
Perhaps other categories -- even before we get to the frontier that Johanna
is exploring? Much of interest to humanities computing, that's for sure.
Yours,
WM
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)171 848 2784 fax: +44 (0)171 848 5081
<Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
maui gratia
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2000 19:49:26 +0000
From: "Price, Dan" <dprice@tui.edu>
Subject: RE: 13.0387 what's interesting about Web pages
What makes a web page interesting? Here are some musings.
Well, it all depends. That seems pretty safe to start with. In this case,
though, it is true. What is the assignment? How is the student trying to
respond to the assignment.
In the beginning, does the tutor in the subject matter realize that the
assignment is to be presented as a web-page? The materials, presentation,
and argument, it seems to me, can all be different in a web page format
than in the more traditional typed (or today, of course, word-processed)
term paper.
The web presentation is different for a variety of reasons. First, because
of the possible use of graphics--what kind of graphics to insert, what kind
of background, what fonts, what size of type for different sections--each
of these elements can aid and develop the argument or weaken it. And all
of these are quite foreign to the traditional term papers on which most of
us were nurtured.
Above all, there is a substantial difference because of the ability to go
back and forth within the posting itself. The reader can be invited into
the middle of the posting and go back to the beginning OR be invited to
skip ahead to a different section altogether.
Actually when we read a journal article we sometimes do a bit of this--at
least I do. I see a title that may be of interest. I may flip immediately
to the back to see the conclusions that the person has drawn and see if in
fact I want to follow the logic to get there. I may start at the front to
see how the problem is framed. OR I may simply jump into the middle and
then sort through either or both of the above.
BUT I think the difference between the web posting and the print journal is
in the physical format. When I flip to the end of the journal article, I
am more conscious of going to the back of so many pages. When I start at
the front of the journal article, I am more likely to be physically
consciously of starting at the front. If I pull something from the
Internet, I may in fact start at the middle and not immediately be aware of
it. Or I can simply click to the end or to the beginning by the one same
physical action --the click of the mouse. This to me is symbolic of the
more circular thinking and less linear kind of thinking to which the web
lends itself.
What does this mean for humanities computing? I am not sure--that's why I
am on the Listserver.
But I suspect it has something to do with the manner of thinking of the
new world that we are entering. So both the content specialist and the
humanities have to be aware of the thought process that is going on for the
interactive presentation. I don't think that we can automatically presume
the same standards and objectives that we had used for print which by the
way, wer are using for these e-mail discussions.
Good question, again, Willard.
--dan
Sincerely,
Dan Price, Ph.D.
Professor, Center for Distance Learning
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From: Humanist Discussion Group
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Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2000 3:58 PM
To: Humanist Discussion Group
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 387.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
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Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 20:46:56 +0000
From: Johanna Drucker <jrd8e@virginia.edu>
Subject: what's interesting about Web pages
Interesting this question that you pose. Ed Ayers, in equally lucid (to
your prose) remarks on a visit this fall posed the same conundrum, his face
as he spoke expressing a scholar's puzzlement: What does it mean to write
as a historian when all of the archive is available to the reader?
A few preliminaries: I might make a substitution for "write as a historian"
and say "write history" and pull apart the act of production from product.
This is not just a nuance, and I think making the distinction is useful as
part of answering the question since the shift of emphasis in the first
example is to a "making" that is always understood as contingent and
performative and the second presupposes some more fixed value in what is
"made". But the two concepts, making and made, production and product,
stand in a similar (though not the same) relation to the archive, so on to
that more fundamental discussion (as long as the caveat stands that in a
more detailed discussion I would want to examine the differences sketched
here).
The first line of a work of mine (that takes its title from the opening
phrase) begins, "Figuring the word against the jealous ground [...]" This
is the crux of the matter as I see it. The ground, that extensive archive
with its inexhaustible seeming repleteness, will ALWAYS want to claim
authority in its apparent-seeming primacy. As if IT IS ALREADY
MEANING, and all meaning. Thus its "jealous" character, wanting to pull
the figure that is produced as a meaningful trope, back INTO itself. Primal
matter attempting to keep separation from occuring. I see this so vividly
as an image -- the primordial swamp of the archive and the figure of
interpretive meaning forming above (though this hierarchy isn't meant to
carry moral valuation).
Ultimately, it seems that the issue of meaning is always only resolved
within finite limits -- that IS the lesson of structuralism, after all. So
the archive, in some sense, has NO meaning. It awaits the act of
"configuration" to be rendered useful. We will, I think, come to appreciate
rhetoric more finely again as the task of constructing a persuasive,
seductive, and engaging argument (the "figure") comes to be recognized as
the scholarly act. The tasks of complete recovery of "evidence" (always
accidental and incomplete) as a scholarly enterprise will be less valued,
except in gazing towards those portions of antiquity that erode behind us
into dust, the contours of old forms barely discernible as fragments,
figments, of an unrecoverable totality. In Figuring the Word, one text
"emerges" from a font of unproofed foundry type that is rearranged, a
demonstration of this idea of the figure of a text coming out of the
inexhaustible possibility of the archive of the type.
So, my answer to your query comes in this form: In relation to the replete
archive, the scholar's task is one of configuring meaning, producing an
interpretation, as a conductor makes a performance from a score (or, as
above, writing makes specific discourse out of the generality of the
alphabet). It is what we have always been doing, only the claim to
authority that the replete archive seems to presume must be qualified just
as thoroughly as when the archive was incomplete. The interpretive act
never attempted to replicate the essence of the archive, but to activate a
dynamic relation among the discourse of figured meaning and the body of
material from which it is written.
Somehow I am NOT managing to reach closure here -- every point seems to
open to other possibilities for understanding this dyanamic relation. I'll
stop, but with the final suggestion that in the next generation a
descriptive langauge for apprehending the *forms of dynamic metalanguage*
that address the tropes of process will come to occupy us. An idea we could
not have even grasped before being posed with this new condition.
Johanna
P.S. After a talk with Will Thomas of VCDH this morning, another more
practical image also became clear. As the "archive" of The Valley of the
Shadow exists, it has potential for a variety of constituencies, some of
whom would be completely unable to use it without assistance. The
"interface" becomes almost a custom tailored tool -- not for each person,
but each kind of user. Thus, school teachers make "lesson plan" interfaces,
scholars have their own search engines, and the lay public might actually
want an "entertainment" interface to display material in a more passive
way. The design of and conception of these interfaces will be a crucial
part of the educational industry in forging useful connections between the
online archives we create and the broader communities of users we wish to
reach.
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