CHAPTER FOUR

Introduction

Susan’s family had lived in the community for generations.Her family name, in fact, is common to the area, but seldom found outside it. She is the younger sibling of two brothers, one of which was considered a gifted writer by his middle school teachers. Susan had access to a computer and the internet at home, and, indeed, according to her post project interview, there had been a computer in the home since Susan was eight years old.

Previous Hypertext Composing Experience

Well, lets just say I’m keeping myself confused because I definetly (sic) don’t like this project at all!It doesn’t make and sense. Why do you have to link social studies to L.A.?They are two different subjects and its boring having history twice a day.I don’t think that we wont(sic) use regular writing in the future like you said on Friday. I don’t think that this project is as easy as you say it is.I can’t find any real information on anything.The only information I have fits into pretty much one box and you need 20!I guess that’s all (Appendix D)

I had not told students that they would not use “regular” writing in the future, but I had told them that they would probably be called upon to use hypertext more and more and that one of the reasons we were learning about it in language arts was because hypertext would probably play a major role in their future reading and writing tasks.

In an impromptu conversation that Susan and I had months later, I asked her why she had been so frustrated in the beginning.She said:

…well here’s the book where it starts at the beginning and goes through to the end, and then [hypertext is something] where you can go here, then here, then anywhere.It doesn’t matter which way you go…I didn’t see how that would make sense to anybody” (Appendix D).

Susan had come up against a form of writing that challenged her notion that text progressed in a defined order of beginning, middle, and end.And she was used to writing narratives that centered around a character in conflict. She was suddenly presented with the task of writing text that held no center, or more accurately, had moveable or provisional centers that shifted with the reader or the writer.Not only was Susan presented with a task where she had to create text with multiple centers, she was face with searching for information through texts with multiple centers.This included search engine results pages as well as hypertext documents on the world wide web.And though Susan indicated at the beginning of the year that she had searched for information on the world wide web, she also pointed out that she had never been faced with such a large information-gathering task as her poetry web called for. Ignacio Ramanet, editor of La Monde Diplomatique, cited in Rollason’s “Library of Babel, says:

There is ... the excess of information, which confronts all Internet users with their own ignorance as they try to find their way through an ocean of information which tends to be difficult to organise or verify; this is the syndrome of the Library of Babel as imagined by Jorge Luis Borges, which contains all the books ever written or to be written (in every language and every script) ... as in that Library of Babel, vast amounts of information are there on the Net, with all their variants and approximations; nothing guarantees the reliability of the data; rumour and fact become as one (cited in Rollason, http://www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/borges/borges_papers_rollason2.html).

Susan may have felt she was faced with this

library of Babel.Presented with what seemed to her an infinite network of information and a task too large and too “different” from one she had ever encountered, at least in a classroom situation, she may have felt overwhelmed and ill prepared to maintain her top grades.

Had Susan been simply asked to write a paragraph about Native American beading, and another paragraph about the significance of salmon in Athabaskan Indian culture, she would have no doubt complied without complaint.But because Susan was presented with what the cognitivists call an “ill structured domain,” (Spiro cited in Britt, Rouet, and Perfetti 44) she was uncomfortable.Spiro defines these ill-structured domains as situations where problems, as in learning tasks, are ill-defined and there may be no single solution (44).Susan was presented with a situation where she had to define the boundaries of the project, where she had to determine herself where she would find information, how she would find it, and which information she would choose once she found it.Plus, she had to use a composing technology she was less familiar with.

As a teacher, I was concerned when I read Susan’s journal entry.Most of the students in the class seemed to enjoy working on their hypertext projects.But Susan indicated in her journal that she did not.She was compliant regarding her work, but the last thing I wanted was a merely compliant student.I wanted Susan to find hypertext composing meaningful, and even joyful.In fact, I was so concerned that I sat down with her and asked her to give her project another two weeks.I sensed that Susan was concerned about whether she could do the work and was even more concerned about getting a good grade.Less important to her was the idea of getting caught up in a new learning experience.I wanted Susan to realize that she could do well on her project, but that she first needed to give it a chance and to get through the part of the task where she had to build her procedural knowledge regarding hypertext.So I told Susan that if, after two weeks she was still feeling frustrated, that I would let her approach the project in a different way. I also contacted Susan’s mother and told her that I knew Susan was resisting, but that I wanted to give her two weeks to get used to hypertext composing.If after that Susan was still resistant, she could take a different approach to the project.Susan’s mother was very supportive.She told me that she and Susan had discussed Susan’s frustration and that she, her mother, told Susan she would encounter many new writing experiences, and that she was bound not to like them all.

Poetry Web

Figure 4.2.This is the opening to Susan’s poetry web on Mary TallMountain’s poem “The Hands of Mary Jo.”

Susan chose to annotate a poem by Mary TallMountain entitled “The Hands of Mary Jo.” When Susan understood that she would not lose control of her ability to earn an A on her report card, she seemed to relax and her frustration levels lessened.The two-week trial period passed and Susan did not ask to discontinue composing in hypertext.Three weeks after she wrote the above journal essay, Susan wrote that she had 21 lexias written for her poetry web project, more than the number she needed to earn an A.And she had plans for more lexias.She also wrote that she had created links in all her lexias and was planning to include more of them (Appendix D). She knew where she wanted to place her links, and she knew where the links would take the reader.Susan was the first student in the class to finish her poetry annotation project, and she seemed quite pleased with that distinction.I told her she could use her extra time to further revise her web or she could “play” on the computer.Susan chose to continue revising her web by changing her background and searching for and inserting other graphic features. It seemed that once she was assured of her “A,” she was free to play with the textual features inherent in graphics and color.It was during this point in her composing process that Susan noted to me that she was having fun. I will discuss this element of her composing processes later in this chapter.

Susan’s initial frustration and the fact that she valued a grade above a new learning experience where she would be challenged to rethink textual organization seems to be a classic example of one of the ways in which grades actually interfere with learning.Alfie Kohn points out that grades often encourage students to think more in terms of how well they are doing rather than what they are doing.Kohn writes that grades create a situation where “interest, like achievement, is usually lower when students are working for a grade” (43).He adds that “traditional grades are likely to lead to three separate results: less impressive learning, less interest in learning, and less desire to do challenging learning” (43).

Susan seemed interested in doing challenging work, but only if she could use familiar discursive forms.When she sensed that she might have difficulty using a new form, she resisted, however respectfully.Fortunately her resistance did not last long, and knowing that she could return to a more familiar discursive form if she needed to seemed to help her.And Susan’s first project, her poetry annotation, was impressive in a number of ways.

Figure 4.3.Screen shot of Susan’s opening to her poetry annotation of “The Hands of MaryJo” by Mary TallMountain. Note the border that matches the theme of the project, and note, too, how the text contrasts nicely with the background color.

First, her opening screen was very attractive. The attractiveness of the page is an indication of the kind of care Susan took in constructing her web.And that care seems to have stemmed from a high level of engagement in the composing act.

During her revision process when Susan found the background that she used on all of her lexias.She commented to me that she liked the earthy-brown color and she thought the arrow head border was in keeping with the theme of her project. The poem she chose to annotate, “The Hands of MaryJo” by Mary TallMountain, initially posed some challenges for Susan, and that was one of the reasons why she was resistant to the project.The final draft of her opening screen only contains five links.However, individual lexias within her web contain at least three links and many of them contain more.The lexia in Figure 4.4, for example, contains four.

Figure 4.4.The unifying graphic, the two items crossed over the feather, which appears on all the lexias that do not have a illustrative graphic.Also note the two horizontal bars.These appear on all the lexias within the web.

In the lexia in Figure 4.4, and in most the lexias in the poetry web, Susan used a unifying graphic—the feather with two items crossed over it.This is in keeping with the concept of a unifying graphic identity suggested by Patrick Lynch and Susan Horton in their Yale Style Guide (http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual). The only times Susan did not use this graphic were when she had a graphic that illustrated the topic of an individual lexia. For example, in the poem she uses “King Salmon” as a linking phrase.The lexia that pops up when the reader clicks on that link has a drawing of a salmon leaping out of the water.

Figure 4.5.An example of a lexia that does not have the unifying feather graphic, but instead uses an image that compliments the text on the lexia.

However, the salmon lexia still has the two horizontal bars that sandwich the text.Susan told me that when she saw that horizontal bar graphic, she knew she wanted to use it in her web, and it appears at the beginning and end of the text on each of her lexias.Susan was the only student in the class to use the same background and to consistently use unifying graphics in this way in the poetry annotation project.Most of the other students in the class wanted to use different colors or different background images on each lexia, as did Adam.But Susan, accustomed perhaps to keying in on teacher expectations and suggestions, made these graphic elements part of her revision even though there was no “requirement” that students use the same background on their lexias, or that they use a unifying graphic.But I offered it as a suggestion to students.Susan acted upon the suggestion. And it is very likely that Susan simply liked the appearance of the bar graphics.In her post project interview she noted that design was very important to her and one of the reasons she enjoyed composing hypertext webs.She said, “I love designing things, because you get your own little touch in it…”(Appendix E).

Susan continued to revise her poetry web, searching for images, and stock-piling images she thought she might need for her next project, the biography web.

Susan initially composed her poetry web using Story Space.She liked Story Space’s mapping function, especially. Susan indicated in a short classroom conversation that Story Space helped her keep track of her lexias and the links she was making to other lexias.Once she finished writing her lexias in Story Space, I observed her copying and pasting them into the web editor Netscape Composer.From there she added color and graphics.Susan could have added color and graphics in Story Space, but she liked the look of the Composer screens better, and so she did all her editing and revising in that Netscape Composer. This is significant because we see Susan making a strong effort to control her composing.She saw in Story Space a tool that could help her do that.

Figure 4.6.A Story Space map view showing part of Susan’s “Hands of MaryJo” web.

However, her composing skills were already sophisticated enough for her to see that she had choices in how she would compose and that she had choices regarding her tools of composition.She realized that Composer gave her more options as a writer.Like a child who discovers there is more than one way to structure a sentence, Susan had discovered there was more than one way to build a web.

Biography Web

In this section I will look at Susan’s composing processes and investigate how an additional composing space—a word processing program--influenced her processes that may have added a degree of complexity to Susan’s composing processes.I will also investigate whether this complexity might be seen as evidence of Susan’s increased agency as a hypertext writer and whether it helped her maintain heightened involvement in the composing process task.

When Susan began working on her biography web, though, she pre-wrote her lexias in MS Word (see figure 4.10), something she did not do for her poetry web. Susan approached her biography project with a very different attitude than she did her poetry project.Her resistance was gone, and she seemed to engage eagerly in the biography web tasks.Part of this may be due to the fact that her notes were organized through the handout packet her history teacher gave her (Appendix H). This packet helped students arrange or organize their note-taking under such categories as “Adulthood,” “Achievement,” etc. Many students in my class organized their hypertext webs the same way, devoting a lexia to “Adulthood,” and another to “Achievements.”

But much of Susan’s change in attitude may have been due to the fact that she simply felt much more comfortable with electronic multi-linear text. She knew how to make links, copy and paste from one screen to another and from one program to another, and to save in the appropriate file, etc.In other words, she had developed enough procedural knowledge about the technology that she no longer had to focus on it.As with Adam, the technology had begun to disappear.Perhaps because of the note-taking support from her history teacher, she knew she would be able to write the required number of lexias to get an “A” in my class.But Susan had discovered something else.

Susan commented to me one day early in her biography web composing that hypertext mirrored “the way people think.” Susan had discovered something akin to what Vannevar Bush saw when he conceived a prototype of a hypertext system (“As We May Think” http://www.theatlantic.com//unbound/flashbks/ computer/bushf.htm) where he envisioned a smart desk that allowed for associational data collection.Bush, after criticizing traditional modes of information retrieval, pointed out that “The human mind does not work that way”(6). Bush went on to say that the mind “snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain” (6).

Patricia Ann Carlson, in an early article about hypertext noted that hypertext “more closely models the deep structure of human idea processing by creating a network of nodes (modules) and links (webs)…” (95).

It is likely that Susan had discovered on her own what Vannevar Bush meant when he said that the mind snaps instantly, and what Carlson saw in the relationship between hypertext and human idea processing.Or it could be that Susan sensed what Roland Barthes, when discussing readerly and writerly text, did when he described the ideal textuality as multiple networks that interact…

…without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable…” (emphasis in original)(5-6).

Susan had made a connection between how she was composing using a web editor and her perception of how her mind linked bits of information and possibly even chunks of text. And this perception is very much in keeping with Deleuze and Guattari’s observation that “Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree” (15).Moulthrop interprets this to mean that the brain is “not a circuit board with engraved pathways feeding through trunks to a central bus, but a self-configuring network of connections that spring up and grow spontaneously” (Promise of Hypertext 256). Whatever it was that Susan sensed, she worked on her biography web enthusiastically. She chose to read a biography about Thomas Edison, and throughout the reading process took notes using the structured note-taking procedure prompted by her history teacher’s packet.

As mentioned earlier, Susan began drafting her biography web by typing each lexia as an MS Word document.But she did not create a new document for each lexia.Rather, she created one long “continuous” document, broken by cite references and the number of the lexia.Without those, her document could easily be read as a report on Thomas Edison (See Figure 4.10).Once Susan had decided what she was going to say in each lexia, she determined what her initial links would be.These she hand highlighted on her word-processed document.Once that was completed, she copied and pasted each lexia into Story Space so that she could create a map of her hypertext web (Figure 4.6).

Rather than label each lexia with a number, Susan decided to label them using an alphabetic letter.It is interesting that Susan used the “show text” option in Story Space so that she could get a small glimpse of the text in each lexia when she looked at her map view.“Show text” allows the writer to see a fragment of the

Figure 4.7. Susan’s Story Space map view where she further planned her biography web. Note that used the “show text” feature in order to remind herself what each lexia discussed. text in each lexia in the map view.This helped Susan when she made her actual links.It is also interesting that Susan chose to copy and paste into Story Space before she did yet another copy and paste into Netscape Composer. Her only explanation for this was that Story Space allowed her visualize her web.

What is important here is that from the very beginning Susan was thinking about how she would link various words and phrases in her web.When she initially composed her lexias in MS Word, she was thinking about her links.And she continued to think about them when copied and pasted into Story Space and then mapped out her web.She writes in her journal:
 

My opening page doesn’t really have much yet.It has no images but I have the alphabet A-U for the lexias.They are links that do not have names yet.The top has the name of my person, Thomas Edison. I prewrote every lexia and copy and pasted it onto Story Space.Now I am searching through the prewritten things and am finding things that link together through the already written lexias. I plan to go to IconBazaar and find pictures.It should be between 20-25 lexias total (Appendix D).

In Susan’s experience with not only her poetry annotation project, but her biography web and her slavery web, which will be discussed later in this chapter, hypertext composing does not seem did not seem to rob Susan of her control as an author.Writing text that would eventually be read by an empowered reader did not diminish Susan’s abilities to make decisions about her web, or to see the results of those decisions almost instantly.This ability hardly dissolved her human authority, or agency, a better word for our purposes here.If anything, it increased it.

Hypertext is not the only form of fragmented text, of course, and so, if we are dissolving human authority, hypertext is not the only discursive form accomplishing that feat.We have magazines, encyclopedias, and textbooks, not to mention visual texts such as music videos.In the impromptu conversation between Susan and me, Susan pointed out that Choose Your Own Adventures are a little bit like hypertext (Appendix F).But she also saw a similarity between hypertext and play rehearsals.Remember that Susan had performed in several plays during her eighth grade year.She saw a relationship between hypertext and a play rehearsal saying that a rehearsal “jumps back and forth from scene to scene…” (Appendix F).

Indeed, my observations of Susan, Aaron, and Cathy, who will be discussed in chapter five, as well as the other students in the class does not lead me to believe that they as authors were experiencing a de-centering process.In a classroom, hypertext composing placed Susan and the others in the center of a writing environment in which they were able to create and work.They controlled the direction of their research, the design of their pages, and the words and phrases that linked their chunks of text.No one provided a format in which they had to write nor did anyone give suggestions about the sequence of information.All of these decisions belonged to Susan and the other students.They were able to make authorial decisions and see the results of those decisions.And they were aware of this.We see that in Susan’s decisions about color and unifying graphics.We see it in the way she marked up her word-processed draft.Susan sensed her agency as a hypertext writer. And though Birkerts and Heim are talking more about the fact that a reader does not transact with hypertext in a way that can always be anticipated by an author, we could say that about any text, a point that Susan makes in her journal entry.

The fact that Susan was faced with creating textual links helped her make decisions about what she would write and how she would organize her text so that she could keep track of her lexias and the links she was creating to and from them. And, of course, her links assisted readability by clearly indicating general categories of information for the reader.

Figure 4.8.This screen shot of Susan’s opening of her Thomas Edison web shows the array of links she provides the reader.Note that the links are in no particular order.
 

In the screen shot of Susan’s opening to her Thomas Edison web in Figure 4.8, notice that Susan chose a background that repeats Edison’s signature.We see here a meaningful merging of graphics and text that is repeated throughout the Edison web.It is important to point out here that Susan used a table for her opening lexia, a layout technique I taught her.Netscape Composer has a table-creating feature.Using tables for web page layout is a common design technique, one that is used on almost all commercial websites.Susan used a two-celled, single-lined table that effectively and attractively displayed her overview of her Edison web.

As she did with her poetry web, Susan finished her biography web before other students in the class.She continued to revise her web by finding more pictures of Edison and inserting them into various lexias. When she decided that she could no longer revise her web, she decided to help other students either find graphics for their biography webs, or to help them proofread their individual lexias.
 

The Study Project
 

Invention and Drafting Strategies
Topic Selection	Selected topic that would provide enough lexias to insure a top grade.
Pre-writing	Read a novel, used notes taken for history class.
Control	Composed first in a word processing program, labeling linking words and destinations.
Links
Placement	In the body of the text (intertextual).
Destination	Sometimes to an “associational” lexia, sometimes to a lexia that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the linking word.
Layout and Design
Text Placement	Written text placed between two horizontal bars
Image Placement	Image placed at top of lexia in center
Background	Used beige background with railroad track border to indicate Underground Railroad, which was in keeping with web topic of Slavery.
Engagement Levels	Worked at home using word processing program.Found web composing “fun.”
Home Computer Access	Yes, with internet access

Figure 4.9.This table provides an overview of Susan’s processes as she composed her study project about Slavery.

As I did when writing about Aaron’s study project, I will divide this section into the various stages of the writing process I saw Susan use as she composed her study project.Unlike the other two projects highlighted in this study, Susan’s study project was part of the eighth grade curriculum in my classroom and was graded.I had initially asked Susan if she wanted to create a new web for the purposes of this study, thinking that she would like the challenge and enjoy working without the pressure of a grade.However, she opted not to compose another project.Susan’s study project focused on American Slavery.

Invention and drafting

Susan began her work on her slavery web by reading an historical novel, True North (1996) by Kathryn Lasky.The novel is about an escaped slave who is part way through her escape via the Underground Railroad, and a white teenaged girl who helps her.Although Susan never indicated this, it is quite likely that she began rehearsing for her future web.Remember that Graves (Fresh Look 1994) considers rehearsing a key element in the process, even though he does not consider the act of composing to begin until the writer puts words to paper (77). Susan’s history class had been studying the Civil War and Susan noted in her post project interview that she knew she would be able to find a lot of information on the topic of slavery.Once she selected her topic, she began searching for information.And, of course, we can consider Susan’s previous hypertext composing as rehearsals for this act of composing.Susan used her knowledge of hypertext web conventions to inform her composing decisions.

It is important to point out here that Susan chose a rather broad topic for her web.She could have narrowed it down to just the Underground Railroad or some other aspect of the institution of slavery in America, but she chose instead to use the broader topic, probably because there was so much information available to her.In this way, Susan maintained a great deal of control over her topic and the processes she used when composing her web, as did all the students in the classroom.Whatever her motivation for selecting her topic, the fact remains that it was broad, and it seems to have been broad for a reason—so she could maintain both the freedom to go where her interests took her, and so that she could maintain control over her potential grade (Appendix E).

Susan’s composing processes may have been affected by the fact that she would be graded on her slavery project.The requirements for the project were similar to those of the other two projects she did.She needed to include twenty well-composed lexias in her web, again with an average of three links per lexia and with reference citations.In addition, she was required to use the same background and color scheme on each lexia.

What is also interesting here is that Susan not only grounded her knowledge about slavery through the reading of a novel, an opportunity she had during a few weeks when the class was not in the computer lab, but she also researched her topic by exploring encyclopedias and other traditional resources, as well as retrieving information from the internet.Other than using electronic sources, Susan’s prewriting information gathering is very similar to that of a child illustrated in Graves’ 1983 book Writing: Teachers and children at work.There, Graves shows that nine-year-old Brian researches by reading, and rehearses his writing through taking notes and talking about his topic (6).During those weeks when Susan was reading her novel, the whole class was talking about the issues surrounding slavery. This was also happening in Susan’s history class.

Graves notes that Brian’s draft was a “patchwork of bits and pieces” (7).And although Brian used tape to merge those bits and pieces, I can well imagine Susan doing much the same thing through the technology of word processing.This is relevant when we understand that Susan drafted all of her lexias at home using a word processing program.This, of course, is similar to the process she used for her biography web.Susan perhaps sensed that she had found a successful approach to web composing and decided to continue using that approach.What Susan did not do for this project was use Story Space to map out her web before she copied and pasted in Netscape Composer.Instead, she made a number of notations on her word-processed version (See Figure 4.10).

Initially she labeled her lexias numerically: Lexia 1, Lexia 2, etc.On her word-processed draft she handwrote “Slave Trade Begins” next to “Lexia 1.”She also crossed out the numerically labeled lexias as she worked through her word-processed draft, copying and pasting them into Composer.This is how she kept track of which lexias she had pasted into Composer.If a lexia number had been crossed out, it meant that she had already pasted it into Composer.

The fact that Susan created a draft of her web using a word processor is interesting, especially when we consider what Zeni writes about the fact that drafts are no longer an aspect of electronic text composing.Here we see Susan creating a draft of her web using another form of electronic text creation—-word processing (Literacy 78).Susan points out in her post-project interview that she composed her word-process draft at home on her home computer.She did have an internet connection at the time of the study, but did not have Netscape Composer on her computer.When asked whether she would have used Composer if she had had the program at home, Susan said she wasn’t sure.But Susan noted that her strategy of word processing her web prior to placing it in a web editor worked “great” for her Thomas Edison project.In her post project interview she said, “Then I thought, wow, this worked great, and so I used it again” (Appendix E).

Figure 4.10.One of Susan’s word-processed pages. Notehow she renamed her lexias after she wrote them. And also note how she indicated which words would be links and where they would link to.
 

But it is also important to note that Susan composed her word-processed draft with the intention that it was just that, a draft, and that she ultimately would re-see, re-vision the draft very differently.Donald Graves identifies the craft of writing as one in which the writer shapes material toward an end that the writer envisions, one that is satisfying to the writer (Fresh Look 6).And though Susan was perhaps never far from creating a piece of writing that would ultimately earn a grade, she seemed to have gained enough confidence in her processes to be able to work not only for a grade but for her own personal satisfaction.And, indeed, had she sensed any tension between those two, she would have probably reacted similarly to the way she did when she first began composing hypertext webs earlier in the school year.

What is very interesting about this draft of her web, however, is the fact that Susan planned and labeled all of her links, using hand-written notations.She underlined in pencil key words and phrases in each lexia and then made a notation, again in pencil, regarding which lexia that word or phrase would link to.

Remember that it is the link that truly sets hypertext apart from other textual forms.Snyder points out that books are essentially repositories of sequential information.And though we do not necessarily process information in a sequential or linear fashion, books give the impression that information is arranged “according to unchanging special grids, in so far as the same information is presented in the same order in which the information is out…” (17).But hypertext disturbs that sense of linearity through the presence of links that invite the reader to chose a path.These links provide a window, which Snyder calls “the defining feature of computer writing and reading”(17).And this window takes on what Bolter claims is “a structural significance” (70) because it allows windows to appear and disappear in a multitude of arrays. This constant rearranging or re-arraying of text allows for the constant new centering of a different text, merely by the click of a mouse.Carlson (1988) believes that hypertext links add “layers of functionality and flexibility” (95) to text that cannot be achieved as easily in book culture text.And though the use of the word “layers” is problematic here, the concept of flexibility is what is important.And this flexibility calls upon hypertext writers to approach the composing task differently.

Links must enter the writer’s consciousness.At some point in her invention and drafting processes Susan needed to deal with the fact that her text would contain electronic links.And she adapted her invention and drafting strategies to include that necessity.Susan chose her topic, deliberately making it broad, so that she would be able to create as many lexias as required for a particular grade.But she also had to create lexias that would allow her enough flexibility to create other lexias.She had to have enough flexibility in her topic to allow for the associational thinking that is required to make hypertextual links.Her decision regarding topic was directly based on the form of writing she would use.And her selection of linking words and decisions about where these words would link were part of her invention and drafting processes.Susan points out in her post-project interview that she often planned her lexias because she knew that she would link from one word to a lexia.
 

Figure 4.11.Note that “1807” is a link. Susan used this date to prompt her to create another lexia entitled “The Law of 1808,” seen in Figure 4.12.

Figure 4.12. Susan’s link “1807” took the reader to this lexia that talks about The Law of 1808.

So, for example, she knew that she would include a lexia entitled “The Law of 1808” because she had used another date in a lexia she wrote before she wrote “The Law of 1808.” Specifically, she talks about the fact that she referred to the date “1807” in a lexia that discusses the abolishment of slavery.When I asked her if the date 1807 prompted her to create a lexia regarding the Law of 1808, she said it did.So we see here that Susan used associational thinking when she was inventing and drafting her lexias.Gregory Ulmerbelieves that such associational thinking is due to the technology itself.He writes, “…the change in thinking from linear indexical to network association--a shift often used to summarize the difference between alphabetic and electronic cognitive styles . . . is happening at the level of the technology itself" (36).But we have to be careful.Certainly associational thinking was taking place before computers arrived on the scene, and certainly Ulmer would agree.But the associational thinking that Susan used when she composed her slavery web was prompted, at least in part, because of the hypertext writing environment that she was working in.Because she knew she would be linking words and phrases to blocks of text, she composed in such a way that those links, or associations, could happen, not only for her as the writer, but for her potential reader.

And so Susan was able to skillfully choose a topic and identify and take advantage of a pre-writing and drafting process that was successful for her, a process that merged two types of text creation technologies—word processing and hand writing. It is important to point out here that Susan drafted her lexias, using the word processing program, much the same way she drafted them for her biography web.That is, if the word-processed document did not have labels before each lexia and cite references below each one, it would read very much like a report on slavery.Susan commented in her post-project interview that when she felt as if she were saying too much for an individual lexia, she would break the information into two separate lexias, meaning, really, two separate paragraphs.She pointed out that she did this, for example, when she was writing about the Middle Passage.She said she did this also when she discussed slave ships.But notice that her lexias about slave ships follow her lexias about the Middle Passage (Appendix D).So we see here two approaches to associational thinking.One is the close relationship between one paragraph and the next—the topic of slave ships and the topic of the Middle Passage.And we see the hypertextual relationship, the intertextual relationship between the idea of slave ships and the event that we refer to as the Middle Passage.

Susan deviated from this somewhat chronological order toward the end of her invention and drafting processes.Part of that might be because she discovered she did not have the right number of lexias to earn an A.Her chronological order seems to end at lexia 15 in her word processed draft (See Figure 4.10).Lexia 16 deals with Harriet Tubman.Lexia 17 deals with Olaudah Equiano.From there she talks about slave ownership, plantation jobs, and slave revolts.But note that she only devotes one lexia to slave revolts.Other students in the class devoted their entire webs to slave revolts. Others, such as Aaron, devoted their entire web to the Middle Passage.

But remember that Susan was very grade conscious, and her decisions regarding what should go into her web may have been based, to some extent, on her strong need to earn “A’s.”However, we also see here something akin to parataxis, what Landow defines as something “which is produced by repetition rather than sequence” (Hypertext 2.0 102).Parataxis is generally thought of as the juxtaposition of two elements or clauses without a conjunction (http://landow.stg.brown.edu/cspace/infotech/Beowulf/paratxis.html).Generally paratactic structures are associated with narrative.But we might be able to see how the last five lexias that Susan composed could be viewed as paratactic. These lexias fall under the very general category of slavery, the topic of Susan’s web, but they don’t really have a great deal to do with her previous lexias.I use the word previous here, because Susan composed her lexias in a specific order, as seen on her word-processed draft. But Susan has found underlying associations between the last five lexias she composed and the previous ones.For example, the eighth lexia, entitled “Compromise of 1850,” which deals with issues surrounding secession, is linked to her eighteenth lexia which deals with slave importation and ownership.There does not seem to be any likely link between these two lexias, yet Susan linked them through the date “1850.”In other words, “1850” served as a linking word to the lexia she entitled “Owned Slaves.”But in that lexia Susan has included a sentence that reads “In 1850 there were 347,000 families that owned slaves, but only one third of them owned over 10 slaves”. In that “Owned Slaves” lexia, Susan used the date “1850” as a link again, but this time it takes the reader to lexia seven entitled “First African Americans.”

Remember that Susan added the last five lexias when she realized she needed more lexias to earn an “A.” But it was absence of closure in a hypertext web that allowed Susan to include additional lexias. Had these been paragraphs tacked onto the end of a report, they would have been awkward. But because they were to be woven into the fabric of information about slavery, worked into the other parts of her web, they worked at the parataxic level, not immediately associational, but working together nonetheless.

Revising and Editing

As was the case with Aaron, Susan used the keying-in process as a space in which to revise her web.She had already made her decisions regarding links and lexia titles, which means she made decisions about what to name the individual files that would make up her Composer web.Remember that Susan did not use Story Space this time.Nor did she compose her lexias in school. Susan said in her post project interview that it was easier to think in the quiet of her home than in the hubbub of a computer lab.Once her lexias were composed, she merely brought to school a computer disk where she stored her word-processed document and copied and pasted each section, which became her individual lexias, into Netscape Composer.

What is interesting is that Susan seems to have planned her layout ahead of time.That may be because she used the same layout for all three websites that she created.But that also seems to have helped her compose the text on her individual lexias.She planned each lexia to be viewed in a single screen so that the reader would not have scroll down.This, too, is suggested by the Yale Style Guide.Susan said in her post project interview:

It’s easy to see everything. It’s like reader friendly, definitely, because you can…read it and you won’t just say, okay, too much information—because I do that a lot—and then you won’t read it.And then it’s easier to interpret, and you can just get everything you want out of it (Appendix E).

If we look at Susan’s word-processed document, sort out the individual lexias, and then compare them to her Netscape Composer lexias, we see that the text itself is almost always the same.Any revising in that sense that Susan did took place as she composed.However that is a rather narrow look at revision, especially when we consider the nature of hypertext and the fact that Susan had yet to add any of the graphic elements to her lexias.

I could make a strong argument here that adding graphics and color are not really part of the revision process, but part of the inventing and drafting process.Bolter points out that in what he refers to as the last era of print technology, images, text, and diagrams merge “without restraint” (79).And though Bolter is actually complaining here that modern computer graphic designers have over-done the amount of graphics that appear not only on computer screens, but in television and print advertising, he acknowledges that “alphabetic text may be anchored anywhere on the screen—beside, above, or below picture elements” (81).But whether Bolter approves of the ways in which images now become part of the “hyper-text,” they are a fact of hypertext composing.

And in a sense we see with hypertext the elimination of what Foucault calls the required subordination of either text to image or image to text.“Either the text is ruled by the image…or else the image is ruled by the text…” (32). In hypertext, however, neither text nor image takes the upper hand, especially when an image becomes a link.In a real sense, then, the image as link is part of the text.Or, we could say that a link, because it generally stands out as underlined and in a different color, becomes an image, a sign that something lurks beyond.

For Susan, image elements were very important.The images were not subordinate to the text when it came to composing.In a traditional piece of text, students will generally focus on what to say and, sometimes to a lesser extent, how to say it.How a piece of text “looks” is not very important unless “neatness” is stressed by the teacher.But how a lexia looked was very important to Susan.In fact, as with Aaron, it may have been that Susan wrote the text for her lexias at home, not only because home was quiet, but because she knew she wanted to spend school time adding the graphic elements to her lexias because adding images was fun. Graphics and images were very important to Susan, so important that she didn’t want to “waste” school time with the written text of her lexias.She could compose her written text at home.She looked for graphics and images at school where the internet connection was fast and reliable and where she could save her images and graphics to her file on the school server.Whatever the reason, the fact remains that gathering images and graphics and placing them on a lexia along with the text she had written was fun.Susan said in her post-project interview:

Well, like, I get to choose how I want my page to look.So if I were doing a report, you know, it’s just typed, and has to be a certain way.Here I can change the color if I wanted to. I can put any colors I want, any pictures I want, any layout I want.I mean, what I want to make the reader get to look at.You know.It’s like a paragraph here, indent here, picture, or double spacing if I had to.This way I can design it any way I want (Appendix E).

…it’s because you use creativity in it.I love designing things, because you get your own little touch in it…My history class isn’t bad, but we just have to do like these packets of stuff…And this is like a different way of learning it…I get to choose how I want my page to look.So if I were doing a report…it’s just typed.Here I can change the color if I wanted to.I can put any colors I want, and pictures I want, any layout I want (Appendix E).

Clearly graphics are seen as a part of hypertext webs, not only because text itself is graphical, but because images are easy to create or copy and insert into a lexia.And images are an important element in hypertext. So, I could make an argument that selecting graphics for any given lexia is part of the drafting process, but recall that the writing process is recursive. And because Susan did not look for graphics that would accompany her text as she was creating her text at home, I have chosen to place that as part of her process here in the revising section. But I want to stress here that working with images was fun for Susan.It was part of the textual play that she engaged in.

Susan initially had chosen a different background for her slavery lexias.

Figure 4.13. This is an earlier draft of Susan’s opening lexia to her slavery web.In a later draft she used a background that contained a name, much like she did with her Edison web.However, she changed her mind because she did not want her slavery web to look like her Edison web.

Susan revised the look of her lexias several times.She initially used the mottled background in Figure 4.13, but when she found a background that used Harriet Tubman’s name lightly printed, she decided to use that instead.However, she realized her lexias would like very similar to those in her biography web about Edison, and so, she used a still a different background, one that included railroad tracks as a border.Susan, in her post project interview said:

…I like this one a lot better because the other one was a lot like the one I had at another site, and this one…set it apart more, and it has an underground railroad thing and I thought it pertained more to slavery…And the color actually brings out a different feeling that I like a lot better (Appendix D).

Figure 4.14.This shows Susan’s final draft of her opening lexia.Notice the railroad tracks at the left.

Notice the subtle differences between the earlier draft and the later draft illustrated in Figure 4.14.In the earlier draft, Susan’s table borders can be seen.  But in the later draft she has configured her settings in the program so that those table borders do not show.She has also changed her background, of course, and made some subtle changes to the directions to the reader at the top of the page.

The order of her lexias on her word-processed draft is the same as the list of lexias overviewed on Susan’s opening screen.It would have been easy for Susan to change this order, but she either did not find it necessary, or it did not occur to her to do so.Whatever the reason, it is interesting to see this small window into her composing process because it shows how she uses her knowledge of book culture text to assist her in the composition of text using a new technology, a technology that can bring with it new conventions of textual organization.

Before I move on to the last stage of Susan’s composing processes, I would like to discuss Susan’s decisions regarding the layout of the other lexias in her web.

Figure 4.15.We see here that Susan has continued to use the railroad motif.But also notice the color scheme and horizontal bars that she uses.

Susan originally planned to use the same image or photograph on all her lexias.She wanted to maintain the concept of a unifying graphic and so she used the image of a slave cottage, pictured in Figure 4.16, as her unifying graphic on all her lexias.

Figure 4.16.Susan originally planned to use this image as an organizing graphic on all her lexias.

However, when Susan believed she was finished with her web, she showed it to another teacher who had wandered into the computer lab during her language arts class period.The teacher, however, thought that he was looking at the same lexia each time he clicked on a link and brought up a new screen.Susan discovered that her image, rather than unifying her web, caused confusion.What is somewhat amusing about this is the fact that I had just told her the same thing.When the other teacher came through the lab, Susan asked him to look at her web, perhaps hoping that he would not find the repetition of the image as confusing as I had indicated.The fact that he did was Susan’s signal to revise her web and use different images on each lexia.

But, as she had done with her previous webs, Susan had finished her slavery web far ahead of deadline, and so the harvesting of more images did not present a problem for her.She kept the image in Figure 4.16 on one of her lexias, however, the one labeled Slave Type of Work on her opening screen.Susan then allowed the horizontal bars and the border to become the unifying graphics in her web.

We can see in the screen shot in Figure 4.14 these graphic elements.Note how they work in the screen shot Figure 4.15 in the lexia Susan calls First African American.

Figure 4.17.Notice how the border and the horizontal bars remind the reader that he or she is looking at another lexia within Susan’s web.

What is interesting in these lexias, however, is that Susan did not provide her reader with a heading or title for each lexia.The name of the lexia appears in the file name that can be found in the “address” line on the screen, but other than the overview on the opening screen and the link the reader had to click on to move to any given lexia, the reader does not know the broad general category in which the lexia falls within the web.When asked about this during a class period, Susan merely said that she didn’t think a title would look good on the page and that she thought the reader would be able to figure out what the lexia was about by reading the text, which, she added, was short enough for the reader to take in quickly.She commented, “I couldn’t…I didn’t like the way it looked with the lines” (Appendix D).  And though this may not have been the same decision I as a writer would make, it seemed to make sense to Susan, and to me, her teacher.t also showed that Susan was making conscious decisions regarding her text, decisions that any writer would make.

Publishing

Susan’s web is published on the internet, and Susan approached her web from the very beginning with the intention of publishing it there.Indeed, her first two webs had been published.And in a real sense, when Susan showed her web to the teacher who wandered through the computer lab, she was publishing it to him.The fact that she realized she needed to make changes once she had published it, gone public with it, is an example of how recursive the writing process can be, that even after publication (even a small public showing to one other person) there is room to revise.

Remember, too, that Susan was very used to going public.She was active in civic theater, and she was an athlete, someone who competes in public.And, as a top student, she may have been used to teachers placing her work on bulletin boards, or using her work as an example for other students.Whatever the case, publication did not seem to carry any special motivation for Susan.She did not seem to work any harder because her web would be published.But perhaps it is important here to mention that publication did not seem to trouble Susan.It was merely an expected part of her process.

It may be important to mention one final point here.All of Susan’s projects looked similar.In Figure 4.18 we see sample screen shots from each of her projects.Note the similarities in the use of horizontal bars, the placement of the text between the bars, and the placement of the images.
 

Slavery Web

Edison Web

Poetry Web

Figure 4.18.Note the similarities between these sample lexias from Susan’s three web projects. The screen shot on the far left is from her slavery web.The one in the center is from her Edison biography web.And the one on the right is from her poetry web.

The only difference in these lexias, other than background and topic, is the fact that Susan linked the lexias in her final project to my website.She did this, she said, because when she was showing her Edison project to her father, she noted the difficulty she had in getting back to my website where I listed other biography projects.She said her father wanted to see what other students in the class had done, and there was no way to do travel back to that site without typing in the web address.So, Susan decided to include my web address on all her lexias.

I have included that here as a publishing decision because the address was placed there not to provide information to the reader about the subject, or to aid the reader in understanding the individual lexias, but to assist the reader in accessing other published projects by other students.Susan had enough procedural knowledge to do this, and she had enough experience with web text to know that this was an important consideration for anyone who wanted to view projects from my website.

The significance here is that Susan envisioned her web for an audience beyond the teacher and that she had engaged in writing as a social act.And the technology of this particular writing allowed it to be viewed by far more readers than is typical of most student writing. Ted Nellen believes that students’ processes are impacted when they know their writing will appear on the internet, but other than this one insertion of a hypertext link back to my page, I did not find that internet publication had any more impact on Susan’s composing process any other mode of publication may have had.Nellen found that his students’ motivations to write and publish increased with the prospect of internet publication.His New York City students created what Nellen calls “webfolios,” or on-line portfolios of their writing.Nellen found that “the internet has eliminated many of the negative aspects of writing while providing many positive aspects” (225).For Susan, who was used to going public with a number of kinds of text—whether they were the text of athletic competition or the text of a theater production—internet publication did not seem to impact her motivation.What seemed to impact her motivation more than anything else was her belief that she could work within a new textual environment and still maintain a top grade.That she did well within this textual environment was no real surprise to me as a teacher.

Conclusion

What surprised me, of course, about Susan was that her initial resistance to hypertext composing turned into embracing the experience so joyfully.I was also surprised that she drafted her study project using a word processing program.What surprised me about this was the fact that she composed it initially as a sequential document, and “exploded” it only after she had the proper number of lexias.Susan had demonstrated that she could draft in Story Space, and I assumed that she would simply draft in either that program or Netscape Composer. It may be that Susan was concerned about getting her project finished in time.She did not have Netscape Composer on her computer at home, and she may have felt that if she composed at home using a word processing program and saving to a disk, she would be sure of finishing her project on time.But I suspect there was another reason.Grades were important to Susan.And she was willing to do whatever work was required in order to insure a good grade.But that work was often not very engaging to her. It may have been that Susan simply wanted to save the “fun” part of hypertext composing for a time during the day when she traditionally did not expect to have fun.She admitted that she found the harvesting of images and the laying out of her lexias the most enjoyable aspect of hypertext composing.In an environment that is not often “fun,” Susan may simply have saved the “fun moments” for that environment.She saved her drafting for homework.She saved her web design work for school, where, coincidentally, she had the tools at her disposal.But remember that Susan finished her project very quickly.She had more than enough time to draft at school and do her web design work.

Whatever the case, Susan’s hypertext composing efforts paid off for her.Not only did she earn an “A” in her language arts class that marking period, she won

Chapter 5