Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 676.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2001 06:20:56 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: function follows form?
About a week ago, in the run-up to submission of a major assignment in the
form of a Web page, I gave an hour's lecture to my first-year students on
essay writing. I concentrated on the difference between argument and
narrative and spent some time on elaborating the structure of the former. I
did this because in my experience first-year students have no idea of what
an argument is: ask them for one and they give you the story of what they
did, blow by blow. So I not only elaborated the point, I belaboured it. At
the end of the lecture, a student came up to me and, clearly puzzled, asked
if she really had to submit a "formal" essay, by which she meant a
structured argument. Since it was to be in the form of a Web page, she
asked, shouldn't the essay be just an account of what she did in
researching the topic?
The question was asked by a bright, attentive student in a class of
intelligent people. So I think that she was listening but that what I said
appeared to her to be utterly at variance with (indeed, irrelevant to) the
nature of the medium in which she was being asked to work. Of course we all
know that one can put old-fashioned essays online, indeed can compose
prose arguments with HTML. I'd be inclined simply to think that her
question came from her somewhat limited experience of the Web -- were it
not for the fact that argumentation in a hypertextual medium is no simple
matter. (As some will know better than I do, a growing body of scholarship
has taken up the problem of how to conduct an argument in a medium in which
the reader ultimately determines the sequence of presentation. It's not at
all obvious that an effective argument is possible.) So I am left wondering
if my student has not told me something important to us all. Are we trying
to swim upstream?
Please note the immediately previous metaphor. Our own conditioning is so
strong that even we are apt to see determinisms where they do not exist
outside our own heads. Of course one can swim upstream, but the subtle (or
not so subtle) force of the flowing water is against the swimmer. Is the
Web pushing us in another direction altogether? Is it a mistake to give
students such an assignment? Should I in the future give that lecture in
costume (and if so, what costume should I wear)?
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Senior Lecturer /
Centre for Computing in the Humanities / King's College London /
Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
+44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/
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