Kevin Ryan (Tokyo)

The Numbered Days of Literature

By Kevin Ryan

Originally published in Gakuen, Showa Women’s University

Digitalization of literary works and references that accompany such works is one way in which advances in technology have changed how a text is treated. This paper focuses on how technology is changing and will change the way we obtain information in a university setting, along with considerations necessary before it can be used to teach subjects such as literature more effectively.

Jacques Derrida, founder of the school of literary criticism called "deconstructionism," was awarded an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University in May of this year. This would not be newsworthy except for the controversy involved. Many in the intellectual community in Europe find Derrida "one of the most important thinkers of the late 20th century" (Newsweek, 1992). Others call his pun-filled prose the work of someone playing a gigantic joke on the academic community. While his style is controversial, his ideas are even more disarming.

Derrida believes that "texts" are continually expanding, changing and being linked to other ideas the moment after they are created, thus disallowing any possibility of "constructing" a static text. Critics, when they "Deconstruct" text, add meaning of their own, making the meaning of the text inherently greater and different than what the author had intended. George Landow of Brown University explains the idea of "text."

Like Barthes Foucalt, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida continually uses the terms Link (liaison), web (toile), network (reseau), and interwoven (s'y tissent), which cry out for hypertextuality; but in contrast to Barthes, who emphasizes the readerly text and its nonlinearity, Derrida emphasizes textual openness, intertextuality, and the irrelevance of distinctions between inside and outside a particular text. ... Derrida in fact here describes extant hypertext systems in which the active reader in the process of exploring a text, probing it, can call into play dictionaries with morphological analyzers that connect individual words to cognates, derivations, and opposites.

Here again something that Derrida and other critical theorists describe as part of a seemingly extravagant claim about language turns out precisely to describe the new economy of reading and writing with electronic virtual, rather than physical, forms. (Landow, 1992, p.8)

Both Derrida and Barthes see texts (lexia in Barthes' 1974 terms) as discreet pieces of information, or reading units. Derrida falls short of a clear explanation when he is only able to demonstrate this parsing with types of punctuation. What they have envisioned, however, has been manifested in the new technology of hypertext brought about by the ease and speed with which a computer can mange large amounts of information and the programs that enable users to quickly access this information.

Hypertext Defined

Applications of hypertext include on-line manuals and help functions. Expert systems (sometimes called knowledge bases) offer an information-rich decision-making structure in particular fields. Even lowly but pioneering computer adventure games incorporate decision trees with which the player can experiment. Interactive text, where the reader chooses different paths of action at critical points in the plot is perhaps the clearest but simplest example of hypertext.

Hypertext is more than a software program, and more than an authoring language, and it is more than making decisions. Hypertext is a psychological construct that enables information to be quickly and easily accessed in the order needed each time it is needed. A network of blocks of information (nodes) connected to each other (links) by indicating one special part of that block of language (buttons) for amplification is how hypertext works. Another manifestation of hypertext adds graphics and sound to make hypermedia. (I will include hypermedia in the definition of hypertext from this point).

In a hypothetical hypertext session, one might sit down at the computer with the intention of studying, say, Mozart. You might discover along the way that he could play a Stradivarius violin while standing atop a Luis XIV chair blindfolded. At the touch of a button, you could call up information about the maker of the violins or how the chairs compared to their earlier styles (with pictures, of course). From there, you might explore how Luis himself met his end, and from there you could explore all of the French monarchy and how it lead to the revolution, and we still haven't touched on what Mozart played while atop the chair.

Hypertext is not necessarily electronic. The front page of a newspaper has aspects of hypertext; your eyes move around, you don't read in order, you only read what interests you. A library is another good example of hypertext, with the card catalog as the core. It is logical that so many of these card catalogs have been computerized.

Antecedents to the technological manifestations of hypertext have been growing since before the beginning of the twentieth century. Besides the deconstructionists, there have been other authors that have experimented with this idea of linking discrete bits of information into a unit. Joyce is the first that comes to mind, but Garcia Marquez, and even Mark Twain have all used non-linear plots and prose to emulate the natural functioning of thought. The clearest example of hypertext-like fiction both in structure and content would be Jorge Luis Borges' Garden of Forking Paths.

Borges' Garden is composed of eight stories...concern themselves largely with labrynthine structures of language; with games, fictions and encyclopedias that attempt to encompass or evoke entire worlds...[In Garden] Yu Tsun, an expatriate Chinese scholar learns from Stephen Albert, a British sinologist of a philosophic theory...[which] did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel lines. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities for time. (Moulthrop, 1991)

Some of this segmentation of texts has an ulterior motive. In scholarly texts, adding footnotes is a way to subordinate the quoted person to that of the author by relegating the quote to smaller print at the bottom of the page. This is done even more subtly when authors quote multiple sources;

...some for refutation and others for confirmation and supplementation - is one instance of a dialogic interrelationship among directly signifying discourses within the limits of a single context. ... This is not a clash of two ultimate semantic authorities but rather an objectified (plotted) clash of two represented positions subordinated wholly to the higher, ultimate authority of the author. The monologic context, under these circumstances, is neither broken nor weakened" (Bakhtin, 1984).

Use of hypertext-like features has penetrated into non-fiction writing to a far greater extent with greater use of cross-referencing. The fact that almost all scientific articles are now written by teams instead of individuals also exploits the strengths of hypertext in that it is much more easily adapted to collaborative writing.

The New Technology

Advances in technology have always affected how we think. When man finally settled down to an agricultural society, there was enough time for some to draw on cave walls, presumably to record important events. These paintings today, under an electric light, feel flat. Look at them with a flickering tallow lamp, and they move, showing that not all technology is beneficial, but does change perception. In Greece during the pre-Christian millennium, words became things in themselves, divorced from reality. Marshall McLuhan believed that this was a transition from "tribal/auditory" man to an unnatural emphasis on visual aspect (McLuhan, 1962). This was a result of the invention of the alphabet, which divorced symbol from meaning because sound intervened. It was only until this happened that science was possible. A similar transition took place at the time of Gutenberg.

Changes in media have been a long and painful process. The period of change, though, has become shorter with each successive change. Normally the process begins with an elite, be they religious or academic or political, and gradually filters down through the society to render change through attrition of the older methods or ways of thinking.

J. David Bolter and other historians of writing have pointed out, for example, that initially writing, which served priestly and monarchical interests in recording laws and records, appeared purely elitist, even hieratic; later, as the practice diffused down the social and economic scale, it appeared democratizing, even anarchic. To a large extent, printed books had similarly diverse effects, though it took far less time for the democratizing factors to triumph over the hieratic - a matter of centuries, perhaps decades, instead of millennia! (Landow, 1992)

Walter J. Ong (1982) and Marshall McLuhan, among others, perceive the advent of new electronic technology as a kind of return to thinking in a more "natural" way. Printed text has caused us to depend on the written word, which has changed the way we do things from building structures, to art, to conversation.

This does not mean that the book as we know it will disappear in the next generation. Black-and-white photography remains a powerful expression of human emotion, but no longer is the standard, having been first replaced by color photographs, then moving pictures. What we will see is a democratization of authorship and readership heretofore impossible because of the costs of book publication.

A Short History of Hypertext

As World War II was winding down Vannavar Bush, President Roosevelt's Science Advisor became concerned with the impending information explosion. Atlantic Monthly published an article by Bush in July 1945, which proposed a solution called the Memex. A memex was a storage device in which thousands of pages of data could be stored. He foresaw the eventual need for linking this information in an "intuitive" way, the way humans think. "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them." He was remarkably prescient in this article, and the real-world manifestation of his Memex is hypertext.

In the 1960's Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext and went on to implement it in the Xanadu project (funded by Autodesk). He reacted against the current trend in Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) to control curriculum to make the teacher's job easier. Nelson's goal is to help students break away from predefined learning methods. His ideal system would be a world-wide information base with all knowledge linked, and users creating new information and links as knowledge grew.

A plethora of hypertext systems have developed since that time, mostly at universities (ZOG at Carnegie-Mellon, INTERMEDIA at Brown, TIES at University of Maryland, WE at University of North Carolina) at the beginning. Later, commercial enterprises entered the fray (NEPTUNE at Tektronix, NOTECARDS at Xerox PARC). Systems are available for almost any operating system. Some are hardware (e.g. HyperCard for the Macintosh) others are software (e.g. IBM LinkWay).

What Does Hypertext Change?

First there was word of mouth, then there were paintings, then manuscripts, then printed test and now electronic databases. Instead of linear text, databased information systems are becoming the norm. Standard General Markup Language (SGML), a mainframe language, is the standard for formatting and indexing information into one huge base. It became an international standard in 1986 (ISO 8879). All U.S. Department of Defense documents are required to follow SGML guidelines in an effort to eventually eliminate paper use.

In 1987 the Association of American Publishers started the trend toward the use os SGML by designing an SGML tag set for books and journals, which has become an ANSI standard. (Reynolds and DeRose, 1992)

The list of associations adhering to the standard is lengthening, with the Aircraft Industry and Air Transport Associations in 1989 and the Telecommunications Industry Forum in 1990. Academics worldwide are standardizing on Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), with several groups encoding gigabytes of literature along these guidelines.

As computer screens get easier to read and computers themselves get lighter, we will see a switch-over to databased information because it will be easier to access than going to a library or other research facility. It is already possible to carry a computer capable of holding several volumes of information that would outweigh the computer by at least a factor of ten were it paper. Combine with that ease of access (the push of a button instead of a flip of many pages), which will motivate many to make the painful psychological jump across the gap to databased hypertext from linear text.

Hypertext changes text. It no longer has borders, and is limitless. References and cross-references allow a person to cover a subject in the depth and order one chooses. Each time a text is "read," it is different. Text is not fixed, access is democratized and decentralized. Rules of rhetoric change or sometimes disappear.

The role of the writer and reader are inextricably intertwined. Some systems allow limited or unlimited access to change, add and link nodes of text, so that while one is reading, it is possible to write at the same time. Collaborative writing becomes more of a norm. Intellectual property loses some of its definition.

Hypertext is mainly used for non-fiction material, but one of the more interesting applications is literary criticism. By linking a literary work with references, criticism and background information, a text often becomes "desacralized" (to use one of McLuhan's terms). It is possible that hypertext could reduce sacred texts such as the Bible to normal text by assimilating it with historical information and criticism (the Bible as literature). Walter J. Ong postulates that the electronic media is a "second orality" with many parallels to the primary orality.

Nowhere will the change be greater than in education. The entire roles of teacher and student will change because of the autonomy that hypertext brings. The inherent structure of hypertext gives students experience with nonsequential reading that is necessary for scholarly work. Most important, hypertext requires critical thinking to assimilate and relate diverse bits of information to arrive at a thesis.

It changes the roles of teacher and student in much the same way it changes those of writer and reader. Its emphasis upon the active, empowered reader, which fundamentally calls into question general assumptions about reading, writing, and texts, similarly calls into question our assumptions about the literary education and its institutions that so depend upon these texts. Gary Marchionini, who creates evaluation procedures for Project Perseus, reminds us that "each time a new technology is applied to teaching and learning, questions about fundamental principles and methods arise" Hypertext, by holding out the possibility of newly empowered, self-directed student demands that we confront an entire range of questions about our conceptions of literary education. (Landow, 1992)

Hypertext fosters a system that is much more interactive than traditional literary education, that of a lecture format. Students have a responsibility to search for information and therefore each may discover different aspects of the same material, thus making more difficult to create a day-to-day syllabus. The advantage is that students are able to link different parts of the curricula much more often, leading to a more integrated holistic understanding of the subject.

At the heart of understanding interactive learning systems is the question of how deliberate, explicit learning differs from implicit, incidental learning. Explicit learning involves the conscious evaluation of hypotheses and the application of rules. Implicit learning is more mysterious: it seems almost like a process of osmosis and becomes increasingly important as tasks or material to be mastered becomes more complex. Much of the learning that occurs with computer systems seems implicit. (Mays, et. al., 1990)

Other advantages of hypertext in the learning environment is ease of preparation. When the appropriate software is used, a body of literature in any subject can be automatically linked with common words or strings of words in different articles. At that point, the program can be set so that links made by either the instructor or the students while "exploring" the texts can be recorded for other students.

Hypertext also frees the instructor to create materials without having to limit the level of difficulty to one particular level. Students then encounter a variety of difficulty that is stimulating. When a certain "branch" of inquiry does become too difficult, the student is free to backtrack and fill in areas of knowledge necessary to understand that branch.

Control Concerns

Some instructors faced with the capabilities of hypertext comment that control is necessary to continue with a certain style of instruction. There are three primary levels of control over a typical hypertext. Some systems are set up so that readers are truly that, readers. Access to change the text in any way is denied to these readers. Also, making the network of texts larger or smaller will limit the freedom of readers and direct them where the instructor wishes. A second level allows readers to make links between texts and add other texts to the initial core. The third level of access is complete ability to change the core text and any branch texts. This allows the greatest freedom but requires a responsibility to the texts, as they are normally communal property in one way or another.

Another ancillary political concern is rights of authorship. Because publishing is so expensive it has lead to the system we have today to insure the investment of the writer and publisher. Systems have been set up where on-line information, when retrieved from a public database (such as Compuserve in the U.S.), the author is credited for that information.

As computing power and memory get cheaper and networking of information becomes more common, hypertext applications will increasingly be used to handle and organize the gigantic quantities of information. New standards of hypermedia will evolve as it melds with virtual reality technology so that eventually to learn and communicate will be a visceral experience. We can advance to a post-literate culture where sound and sight are more balanced and where the alphabet will no longer get in the way of thinking. But this is another topic. In the meantime, hypertext will change the way we teach and the way we read, not replacing great works to this day, but transforming them into a body of knowledge that is encyclopedic and adaptable to each user's needs.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics. Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York. Hill and Wang, 1974.

Bolter, J. David. "Topographic Writing: Hypertext and the Electronic Writing Space," in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, eds. Delaney and Landow: Cambridge MA and London, MIT Press, 1991.

Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992.

Mays, T., et. al., "Learning about Learning From Hypertext," in Designing Hypertext, eds. Jonassen and Mandel, Springer-Verlag, 1990.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

Moulthrop, Stuart. "Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of `Forking Paths'." in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, eds. Delaney and Landow: Cambridge MA and London, MIT Press, 1991.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

Seyer, Phillip. Understanding Hypertext: Concepts and Applications. Blue Ridge Summit, PA.: Windcrest, 1991.

Reynolds, Louis R. and DeRose, Stephen J. "Electronic Books." Byte, June 1992.

Sullivan, Scott. "Honoring the Absurd?" Newsweek, May 25, 1992.