ccr 760: hypertext rhetorics

course projects: individual hypertext

Your participation in this project accounts for 30% of your overall course grade. My intention for this project is that it not begin in earnest until the submission of your project proposal, that is, until you've had a chance to familiarize yourself with hypertext a bit, particularly in terms of the ways that it differs from more traditional forms of discourse. The last month of the semester will be given over to this project, both in terms of class time to work on them and workshop them with other members of the course.

My goal for this project is that each of you produce a publishable hypertext. This is not as formidable a goal as it may seem at first. There are a number of journals supposedly devoted to publishing this sort of work, but which actually do little of the sort. Having spent 3-4 years so far on the editorial board of one such journal, I can say with certainty that the problem isn't a lack of quality but a lack of quantity. The outlets are there.

the basics

There are no generic restrictions on the hypertext you write. Much of the hypertext criticism we will read this semester specifically discusses "literary hypertext," but most of its discussion pertains equally well to exposition as it does to narrative. Likewise, if you wish to work with a so-called "creative" genre, you are welcome to do so.

There are no technological restrictions on your hypertext either. While we will be focusing our attention on the Web for the most part, it is not the only delivery medium for hypertext. It is equally possible to write hypertexts in Hypercard, StorySpace, Macromedia Flash or Director, or even on a MOO, and any of these media are acceptable. Moreover, I will not be evaluating your hypertexts according to some mysterious standard of technological sophistication. There are many quality hypertexts whose interfaces are the electronic equivalent of notebook paper. I am more interested in issues of structure and density, and it is possible to achieve compelling work with a basic grasp of HTML.

Strictly speaking, this does not have to be an individual project, either, although I named it such to distinguish it from our other major project in this course. If you wish to work with one or two other people on this project, the hypertext will simply need to be 2 or 3 times as large as it would be otherwise.

So much for what this project is not about. Here are my basic expectations. I expect each of your hypertexts to contain approximately fifty nodes, keeping in mind of course that a node does not equal a specific word count. I am not especially interested in counting words, in fact. Your hypertext should be dense enough to support multiple readings/paths, and I think that this can be accomplished with that number of nodes.

proposal

I'm asking you to submit a project proposal, wherein you discuss your initial plans for this project, by February 25th. I want you to have read some of the works for this course before you think about how you will proceed; what Landow and Joyce have to say about hypertext may very well affect how you approach your project. There are no formal requirements for the proposal, but they should give me a sense of your project, and include as much detail as you are capable of at that time. I may ask you to add a node with the proposal, and link to it from your participant page, so that others can see and respond to them.

Also, expect to be responsible for a progress report to the class on April 8th.

topics

There are no restrictions regarding topic, but I do have a few ideas for you to mull over as you begin to plan your project. Linked to this page, I've included a call for papers that was released last fall, for a cooperative effort among five e-journals in our field. While the deadline for the call has passed, it should give you some idea of the kinds of ideas that people in our field are interested in, areas that remain undertheorized or unexamined.

There are a number of intersecting areas of concern that we will not be addressing explicitly during this course. That doesn't mean that they won't come up, or that we won't talk about them during class. It only means that, in a course that surveys the field of hypertext rhetorics, I didn't have the space to include more specific work on them:

• Hypertext and gender/feminisms
• Race in/and Cyberspace
• Hypertext pedagogies
• Hypertext and cognition
• Hypertext and collaboration
• Hypertext and literacy theories (orality, literacy, electracy)
• Hypertext/hypermedia/multimedia
• Hypertext and art
• Hypertext compared to other media (cinema, e.g.)
• Hypertext across the curriculum
• Politics of hypertext
• Hypertext and design

This list is by no means exhaustive. It stands to reason that, as pervasive a guiding metaphor as literacy has been for our society and culture, any technology that would challenge that metaphor would have implications equally widespread.

Now and then: Another possibility, given the scope of this course, would be to focus either on a particular author, or a key term, within hypertext criticism, and to attempt to trace out how that idea or critic has changed over the past several years. Both Landow and Jay Bolter have books in their second (revised) editions, and Michael Joyce and Mark Poster have both published two books. There are any number of other critics as well whose ideas and approaches to hypertext have changed over the years, and you might try a mini-history of one of these thinkers.

deadline

This project is due on the last day of finals.

As additional questions arise concerning this project, I will address them here and in class.