ccr 760: hypertext rhetorics

course projects: collaborative hypertext

Your participation in this project accounts for 30% of your overall course grade. With the exception of the final exam for the course, which will make use of your work on this project, you should be finished with this phase of the course by April 1st, giving you the final month of the course to work on your own hypertext.

the basics

My vision for this project is that it should take the place of any sort of reading responses, notes, journals, listservs, webboards, etc. That is, it will be an ongoing accumulation of discourse about our readings for the course, but rather than writing solely for yourself, you will be adding nodes to a hypertext to which our entire class will have access, both as readers and writers.

In terms of production, I expect each member of the class to contribute roughly 500-600 words per week, the equivalent of a couple, double-spaced pages of type. Furthermore, each of you should contribute at least two nodes per week, one that responds directly to something you find in the week's readings, and one that responds to another class member's writing. How you divide up your word count is up to you--and certainly you may write more than 2 pages worth of prose, or more than 2 nodes, as you see fit.

Each week, one of us will be responsible for posting an introductory page for that week's readings, and that page will count as that person's node(s) for the week. The introductory page should focus on summarizing the reading, and including as many keywords from the work as possible (ideally providing everyone else with fertile ground for linking).

deadlines

Because we are dependent on the introductory page to make our own links, the person responsible for a given week should post his or her page no later than the Friday prior to class. Also, in order to give everyone time to read a given week's offerings, all other posts must be complete by Sunday, the day before class, and ideally earlier. We are not meeting on the second Monday of the semester, due to the Presidents/MLKing holiday, and this should give us the time to work our way ahead of these deadlines.

One more note about deadlines here. This project is collaborative and participatory, which means that if your posts aren't on time, no one else will be able to respond to them. This defeats the purpose of the assignment, and so you will not receive full credit for nodes that are posted after the deadline. The more disciplined we are as a group, the more rewarding this activity will be.

rules

In order to facilitate organization and interaction, let me suggest the following rules:

• Our topics will overlap, so it is easier if we name our files by author rather than content. In other words, name your files with your last name, the week, and the number/letter of your post. For example, for the first week of reading (Landow), I would name my files "brooke1a.html" and "brooke1b.html" and so on. This will make things easier on all of us, I suspect.


• We must maintain a fundamental respect for each other's words. The only change you are allowed to make to another person's files is to insert a link to your own work. If you want to link from a person's page, and there is no word or phrase that seems useful to you, then you should contact that person, and either ask them to make a change or ask if you can make a change.


• You are welcome to design your nodes in any manner you see fit, and that includes the use of graphics, typographics, etc. My only requirement beyond the text itself on your page is that you include some sort of byline that links back to your participant page. It wouldn't be a bad thing for you to update your participant page with links to (and the titles of) your posts each week, either, but that's not a requirement.


• Because we will all be working from the same set of pages, it is important to remember that other people may be making changes at roughly the same time you are. Don't download a version of a page, and wait a day to repost it with your changes. If you do, you may erase changes that others have made in the interim. The best way to approach this, any time you are making a change or adding a link to a previously posted node, is to make that change as quickly as you can. Inevitably, accidents will occur, so keep track of the links you add, so you can go back and add them again if necessary.


• Finally, it is likely that we will return to the same set of topics in the context of different readings. I strongly encourage you to add more links to our web than just the two necessary to reach your pages. Link from your own pages to other nodes, and when you find yourself returning to a topic, go back to earlier weeks' nodes and make more links. The denser our hypertext is linked, the better.

sum of the parts

In all, you will be posting nodes for nine weeks during the semester. This part of the class will end with M.D. Coverley's Califia on April 1st. As additional questions arise, I will address them both here and in class.