Kevin Ryan (Tokyo)

Toward a Stylistics of Digital Media

Kevin Ryan

In the Northeast region of Spain, people from Catalonia have a saying, "To be a man you must do three things; plant a tree, father a child, and write a book."

Authoring a book, that third rite of passage for a Catalan, is many times the one that takes the most effort, at least up front. Writing a book causes immense pleasure on completion, and even more when the publisher delivers it and you can hold it in your hands. The feeling of a completed product is very gratifying.

Most electronic documents are never finished. Nonetheless, the sense of gratification is ongoing as the document develops. Electronic documents are so much more vibrant, active and flexible, that the feeling of accomplishment is exponentially better than writing a linear paper-based document. Mastery of this new format, the electronic document, is the focus of this article.

As the world moves from paper-based documentation to textual and graphic representations created by electronic pulses on a screen, it is clear that technology has outdistanced human conventions. It took 40 or 50 years for conventions of printing to be developed after Gutenberg printed his first Bible. Things like titles, section headings, paragraph placement, margins, fonts, leading and other standards taken for granted today, did not exist then. The same thing is happening now with electronic documentation. The problem is that we do not have 40 or 50 years to develop new standards. There is a concerted effort in many of the scientific fields and in information storage to handle the new flexibility offered by electronic documentation. The does not seem to be much of an effort in the arts, especially literature, yet.

Readers (dare we say consumers?) of literature are often very frightened of the changes brought about by computers and other technology that allows increased expression in this new format. Literary pundits often resign themselves saying that these changes are inevitable, yet do nothing to adapt to these changes. It is especially important to develop new standards so that our students can see their way clearly through the process of creating electronic documentation. It is only when they feel comfortable with this new media that they will be able to become literate in today's society.

But, through fear or otherwise, if we tend to shy away from this change, it will be others that determine how the new paradigm looks, feels and works. Corporations (followed by governments) are far ahead of school libraries in data storage and mining techniques, a crucial area of electronic documentation. This is just one example of how we are acceding "ownership of the process" of electronic documentation. It is an all-important distinction that we face here. Electronic documentation is a process, as opposed to the paper-based products we call books.

Following is an outline of some of the aspects of electronic documentation that need to be addressed so that our students may learn the standards, and effectively navigate the new media.

Our students have a chance on handling the new media with skill if we show them now. Us older educators that read this are probably never going to "get" the new media.

Characteristics of Electronic Documentation

1) Electronic documents contain many kinds of media. This varies mostly according to the delivery system. The low bandwidth web requires pictures are relatively low quality, with sound and video that cannot compare to the analog world. But even today, users of Microsoft Outlook, for example, send e-mail messages with decorative backgrounds and short electronic songs the company their message. More importantly, the multimedia extensions of current messages and documents will become more integrated into the semantics of those documents. Data compression such as MP3, along with wide-band connections like ADSL and cable modems, will eliminate any reason not to in include audio, video, graphics, and animation in everyday documents.

2) Electronic Documents are dynamic, paper is static. Document have a process by which they are created, maintained, stored, retrieved and finally deleted. This process brings up concerns such as filing, security, access, backup, and assigning values to each document.

The following principles apply to documents in any medium and are based on the information management principles developed by Parer and Parrott (1994).

1. Manage the whole document life cycle

2. Identify your valuable documents

3. Ensure the quality of information about your documents

4. Secure your valuable documents

5. Provide appropriate access to your documents

6. Preserve your valuable documents

3) Electronic documents are marked up.

In the beginning there was SGML (standard general markup language), an effort to make different parts of a document do different things without using anything more than the basic 128 characters in ASCII, which consists of only uppercase and lowercase alphabets with punctuation. In the beginning document to mark for things like bold italics, later sections, titles and other conventions were added. Finally, semantic elements such as definitions and referents were added.

HTML is a subset of SGML. The 40 or 50 basic markers were designed for the Internet. Each version grew in the number of markers until now we are at version 4. Dynamic HTML, or DHTML is an extension of HTML that allows greater freedom of animation and standardization within a document. Cascading style sheets (CSS) allow one to create a template a document to be filled in with specific information by an author, a person reading the document, or even another piece of software such as a spreadsheet. One big advantage is that you can't change attributes to each of these tags to change documents on global scale, either throughout the document or throughout the entire application.

"SGML provides an internationally recognized, non-proprietary language for writing your own markup schemes." (Exeter, 1996)

XML takes the process of marking up a document even further. Extensible Markup Language allows one to create tags for a specific document or field of study, such as linguistics. XML allows me to make tags specific to my situation, such as building number on campus, or book title in our library, or arguments about computers on campus. Once marked, I can then make each of these tags do anything I want within a document. Turn all building numbers to red and bold? Fine. How many books in the library have titles that begin with Data? No problem. Which arguments are for computers at Showa? Punch one button and they are all lined up in a row.

But the real strength of XML is when a group of users agrees to use the same tags. The medical profession now has a de-facto standard of XML so that doctors can exchange documents electronically that are marked up to tell the computer which parts are formulas, diagnoses, or research results, for example. Linguistics, language acquisition and EFL should each have their own set of tags. Computational linguistics is working hard at creating just such a set of tags. EFL and ESL are fields that are ripe for a set of XML tags, as evidenced by a discussion on the Interenet between a group of computer-savvy teachers grappling with a set of tags to show common interlanguage conventions and errors made by students. This would facilitate feedback to students by pointing them in the right direction for support materials created once by one person and used many times by anyone in the world. This would be the perfect job for a group of university educators.

Developing a set of standards for markup within our profession would make document exchange easier. Anyone trying to go from MSWord on a Windows machine to WordPerfect on a Macintosh knows how difficult it is. With markup, the conventions are all encoded in ASCII, the lowest common denominator (besides Assembler language) for computer transfer. Submission of articles to journals will soon require some markup before they are accepted. Common word processors now can mark up documents, or encode them for public distribution.

Efforts in corpus linguistics such as CoBuild create the need to mark large quantities of text syntactic and semantic elements. Concordancing will become much easier when these large bodies of text are marked appropriately. Natural language processing (NLP) is at a point where what to marking of these texts will become automatic. Parsing a text or document means to recognize the elements, both syntactic and semantic, and divide the label the text accordingly. In away what the parser does is deconstruct language.

4) Electronic documents can have embedded programs.

Programs made with languages like JAVA or ActiveX can make your documents interactive, they can ask questions and act on answers to customize themselves to your needs. When I access my home page, I can tell it which city to show the weather for, which stocks to display and which areas of news I am interested in. The content changes daily according to what the ActiveX program searches for on the Internet.

5) Electronic Documents can have a variety of inputs and outputs

Speech Recognition and Speech Production will change the way we interact with computers and other technology. With a growing rate of recognition, now at aboput 99%, the common statistical methods that use stochastics like Markov’s to model natural languages to essentially make guesses about combinations of words. A major improvement in speech recognition technology has just been discovered and should become commercially available in two to 3 years.

"Neurobiologists Jim-Shih Liaw and Theodore W. Berger have created the Berger-Liaw Neural Network Speaker-Independent Speech Recognition System, which is comprised of just 11 electronic "neurons" and 30 links. It is capable of understanding speech embedded in white noise (such as fans, electronic hissing or party babble) better than humans can." (Ryan, 2000)

Speech production will allow teachers to feed text into a computer and have a voice almost indistinguishable from a human recite that text. This will make web-delivered text into listening exercises for our students. Many more applications of this technology are already in the works at companies like Dragon Systems and Lernout and Hauspie.

Digital documents can also have a variety of output channels like Braille readers and large displays that integrate more and more of the senses. Web based smell is being tried as a commercial venture, for example.

5) Electronic documents can be (and usually are) social or collaborative.

While developing materials for paper-based book, my co-author and I only met four times during the six-month process. We collaborated using e-mail and file transfers to develop a book on e-mail, which is entirely appropriate. Developing materials is increasingly done not alone, but within a group. As issues and field of study get more complex, the image otherworldly scholar in a small office in the ivory tower is increasingly marginalized. Scholars in the hard sciences have been practicing this kind of research for three or four decades now. We're only beginning to see this in ESL and EFL.

Janet Murray of MIT has been involved with both computers and literature since the 1970’s. In many of her classes she experiments with collaborative writing individual social environment called a MUD or MOO (for Multi User Dimension). This virtual world goes beyond a real-time Chat group, with members being able to manipulate the environment through a series of simple commands. Thus I can create, within this virtual world, a gold pendant, then give it to someone and talking to within that environment. Murray and her students have discovered that this immersive world is especially good for learning languages. MUDs have been banned that some universities because students began spending far too much time in these virtual worlds interacting with others instead of going to class. Since language learning in my opinion is 90 percent motivation, this immersion is a wonderful tool.

6) Copyright and intellectual property

One of the largest concerns of electronic documentation in general, and collaborative writing in particular is that of copyright. There should see large change in the economic structure of universities, especially for professors and the publication paradigm shifts away from expensive printed text to malleable electronic documentation. David Noble of the University of Toronto rails against the "commoditization" or "commodification" of knowledge and teaching through electronic delivery. He sees online delivery of learning materials as a plot by the administration to gain more control over the production and distribution of knowledge within University. Some administrations are requiring instructors to put notes and exercises online, purportedly to allow students greater access, but may eventually try to massively distribute the knowledge without paying the instructor, or at least paying very little.

Advocates for free information continue to argue with commercial concerns about this fact. The history of the Internet favors information distribution and an alternative economy of information, not yet worked out. Professors, in the future, in my opinion, will create small programs to show what will happen in their "courses" as a kind of advertising. Students will then join online sessions either on a course basis or perhaps on an hourly rate if they are not degree-oriented students (even though degrees are meaning less and less in Silicon Valley).

Manifestations of Electronic Literature

Three different types electronic document exemplify advances in literature in the computer age. Hypertext was first proposed shortly after World War II and developed in the '50s, before computers are common. The World Wide Web is one example of a huge hypertext with practical limitations. MUDs are an example of real-time collaborative literature.

MUDs and MOOs

Janet Murray’s work with collaborative immersive environments over the Internet with students leads her to postulate a change in literature and the style of writing. Since electronic documentation is procedural, that these procedures follow a pattern that varies within a small range, writing by interaction is not true authorship, but being an agent of the the author, the one that set up the program, the milieu, the virtual world. To be a true author:

"The author must be able to specify all the elements of the abstract structure: the primitives of participation (how an interactor moves, acts, converses); the segmentation of the story into themes or morphemes (the kinds of encounters, challenges, etc., that make up the building blocks of the story); and the rules for assembling the plot (when events happen and to whom). The author must also be able to control the particulars of the story: all the substitution elements (instances of character types, dangers, rewards, places, travel experience, etc.) and all the ways in which each instance will vary." (P. 204) (Murray, 1997)

Murray revisits the bardic system of writing, where plays were representations of a small set of plots with another set of possible variations, much like Baroque music is almost formulaic in its adherence to mathematical proportions.

"The Bardic system is fundamentally conservative; it serves to transmit a fixed story from teller to teller and from generation to generation. But what it conserves is not a single particular performance but the underlying patterns from which the bards can create multiple varied performances." (P. 194) (Murray, 1997)

This has an historic precedence

"In the 1930s, Greek scholars were distressed when literary analysis revealed that homer (and other epic pre-literate poets) created through a process that involved fitting stock phrases and formulaic narrative units together." (P. 153) (Murray, 1997)

Neil Postman is very much afraid of this kind of individualized learning and constructivism in a classroom situation, preferring the safe regulated atmosphere of the classic classroom situation.

"In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility....

Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech?" (Postman, 1995, p. 17)

Although Postman bemoans this change, it is welcome among many kinds of educators, this one included.

Hypertext

Some of the best examples of current hypertext fiction can be founded at Eastgate. Special software has been created to aid writers of this type of fiction, which depends on links from one "text" to another. These connections become part of the structure of the work, both constraining and adding flexibility so that readers can have a different experience each time they experience the work.

"Take, for instance, hypertext, a type of new media inconceivable without digital technology. It is an emerging form, with an emerging set of rules and conventions involving montage, juxtaposition, and other techniques and sensibilities derived not only from writing, but also from film, music, and visual art. To work well in this demanding medium requires skill, intelligence, and above all, patience, for the form remains neglected by critics who, like Gass, prefer to dismiss what they cannot be bothered to understand." (Greco, 1999)

The WWW

The world wide web is a laboratory for design features and rule-making for electronic documentation. Authors, besides dealing with traditional "content" or text, must also consider the format of the text, navigation buttons and bars, link colors, graphic download overhead, and screen size, to mention a few areas.

Personal experience with creating a web-based course in English for Engineers (DEEP) has involved me in all of the above issues. Creating a web-based based document such as this course is much more complex than writing a book. The most difficult and is the most interesting part was deciding on what kind of format the activities would take. This is already decided in a book. Including Java script to make the activities more interactive and deciding on how the activities were linked together and the whole new dimension to writing. The sense of accomplishment was all that much greater when the course of first published on the web. But because electronic documentation is never finished I continue to update and improve the document as well as giving personal feedback and guidance to the participants that are working through the web site.

Involving students in the process of creating web-based documents or hypertexts is a natural extension of a computer literacy course. The required first-year course that we teach Love Showa is a perfect example. In the fall of 1998 five sections of the Writing with Computers course collaborated on writing hypertext about Love. Class leaders met outside class and decided on the general topic. Each class today some topics such as sexual love and brotherly love. Each small group chose a further sub-topic such as volunteering and charity. Each individual narrowed her choice within those sub-topics. When students had to choose paragraph topics and supporting sentences within those paragraphs, they sought as a logical extension of what the group was trying to do. After each created a small text the final exam was to find links between students, small groups, and classes. The final product is on the Web at the Writing With Computers site. It consists of 95 different texts with over 300 links between them, creating a reference work that is active and responds to the interest of the reader.

Works Cited

Exeter, University of, 1996. The SGML Project, Univ. of Exeter IT Services http://www.ex.ac.uk/SGML/whysgml1.html

Greco, Diane, 1999. Sticky Fingers, HypertextNow, Eastgate Technologies. http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/archives/Gass.html

Parer, D. & Parrott, K. 1994, `Management practices in the electronic records environment', Archives and manuscripts, vol.22, no. 1, p. 106.

Postman, Neil. 1995. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York, Vintage Books, pp. 16-19.

Ryan, Kevin, 1999. Distance English for Engineers Program (DEEP). EigoMedia and Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology, http://www.deep.pair.com/

Ryan, Kevin, 2000. Neural Rhythm a New Approach to Speech Recognition, TESOL CALL-IS. In Press.

Notes: I always feel in a conundrum whenever I write for Gakuen. The first step of writing a good paper is to know your audience. The problem here is that most of these journals are distributed to students, but it is usually the teachers that read them. The journal is produced by a third entity, the university. So do I write for the teachers, the university or the students? This could be easily resolved in an electronic document. To show you what I mean, I have recreated this article in an electronic format at http://kevinryan.com/gakuen/2Kjan.htm