Title: The Literary Hypertext as a Version of the TeacherScholar Model Fall University Teaching and Learnin
1The Literary Hypertext as a Version of the
Teacher-Scholar Model Fall University
Teaching and Learning InstituteAugust 30, 2002
- Peter Stoicheff
- Department of English
- University of Saskatchewan
2What is hypertext anyway?
- The term was coined by Theodor Nelson in the
early 1960s
3What is hypertext anyway?
- The term was coined by Theodor Nelson in the
early 1960s - It refers to a digital or electronic text that
has links to its different parts (internal) or to
other texts (external)
4I became interested in the scholarly
possibilities of hypertext because
- of the complexity of Ezra Pounds Cantos
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6The components of that complexity are
7The components of that complexity are
- Its intertextuality
- Its interdisciplinarity
8The components of that complexity are
- Its intertextuality
- Its interdisciplinarity
- Its many languages
9I became interested in the pedagogical
possibilities of hypertext because
- Graduate students in the English Department,
responding to a questionnaire, said they wanted
to work more collaboratively and less in
isolation (1995)
10This request got me thinking about
- How my friends in the sciences work closely with
other scientists
11This request got me thinking about
- How my friends in the sciences work closely with
other scientists - How their graduate students collaborate with each
other
12This request got me thinking about
- How my friends in the sciences work closely with
other scientists - How their graduate students collaborate with each
other - How an offprint of mine looks like this ...
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14while offprints in the sciences look rather like
this
15While I was thinking about collaboration and
offprints and graduate students and Pound and
hypertext I ...
- Had two graduate students assistants (Sherry Van
Hesteren and Tim Drake, supplied by the English
Department) to help me with marking and some
library research (1996) - Was teaching T.S. Eliots The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock
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17I realized
- The graduate students were being under-employed
doing occasional marking and library work
18I realized
- The graduate students were being under-employed
doing occasional marking and library work - The first-year students were finding Eliots poem
difficult because it was highly intertextual,
interdisciplinary and multilingual
19I figured
- The graduate students would be more fulfilled if
they worked together, and with me, on something
...
20I figured
- The graduate students would be more fulfilled if
they
worked together, and with me, on something - That something could be a digital edition of
Eliots intertextual poem ...
21I figured
- The graduate students would be more fulfilled if
they worked together, and with me, on something
- That something could be a digital edition of
Eliots intertextual poem - The digital edition could be used in the
first-year classroom.
22I suggested to the two graduate students that we
- Learn some basic encoding languages like html
- Create a website for The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock (1996)
23One of the first inspirations for the site was an
image in Edward Tuftes Envisioning
InformationPrufrock
24Encouraged by the success of that early
collaborative effort, I designed an Honours
English course on hypertext. In it, students
planned what a hypertext edition of Mary
Shelleys Frankenstein might look like. Why
Frankenstein? (1997)
- Because Shelley wrote two versions (1818 / 1831)
- Because the manuscripts are interesting
- Because it has been rewritten so frequently
- Frankenstein
25That summer (1997) I hired two graduate students,
Jon Bath and Corey Owen, who had been in that
class and together we
- Gathered the information collected during the
course - Started creating the Frankenstein website
- Kept track of the editorial challenges the new
digital platform faced us with, and wrote a
co-authored paper on it all for Computers and the
Humanities.
26That articles title page looks something like
this
- The Ghost in the Machine Editorial Issues in
the Design of a Digital Literary Edition - BY Jon Bath AND Corey Owen AND Peter Stoicheff
- Computing in the Humanities XVI October 1999
301-28.
27In a graduate course the following year (1998) we
designed a hypertext edition of William
Faulkners The Sound and the Fury because its
narrative structure is very complex.
28That summer (1998) I got some funding to hire my
doctoral student, Allison Muri, to begin
programming the design arrived at by the students
during the course.
29The following summer (1999) I got some more
funding and hired a new M.A. student, Joel
Deshaye (you just heard from him), to continue
the digital work Allison began. I also hired a
continuing M.A. student, Maria Truchan-Tataryn,
to do Faulkner-related research for the
site. The Sound and the Fury
30Meanwhile ...
- The T.S. Eliot site was getting 1,500 hits per
month
31Meanwhile ...
- The T.S. Eliot site was getting 1,500 hits per
month - I had hired an undergraduate student (David
Mitchell) to continue working on it (1999)
32Meanwhile ...
- The T.S. Eliot site was getting 1,500 hits per
month - I had hired an undergraduate student (David
Mitchell) to continue working on it (1999) - The Frankenstein site was getting 3,000 hits per
month
33Meanwhile ...
- The T.S. Eliot site was getting 1,500 hits per
month - I had hired an undergraduate student (David
Mitchell) to continue working on it (1999) - The Frankenstein site was getting 3,000 hits per
month - We were getting a lot of responses to the two
sites from scholars and students around the
world.
34Also in the meantime, various combinations of
graduate students previously and presently
involved in the projects gave talks and invited
papers to ...
- The Changing the Climate graduate conference at
the University of Saskatchewan
35Also in the meantime, various combinations of
graduate students previously and presently
involved in the projects gave talks and invited
papers to ...
- The Changing the Climate graduate conference at
the University of Saskatchewan - The English Department faculty
36Also in the meantime, various combinations of
graduate students previously and presently
involved in the projects gave talks and invited
papers to ...
- The Changing the Climate graduate conference at
the University of Saskatchewan - The English Department faculty
- The University graduate student community
37Also in the meantime, various combinations of
graduate students previously and presently
involved in the projects gave talks and invited
papers to ...
- The Changing the Climate graduate conference at
the University of Saskatchewan - The English Department faculty
- The University graduate student community
- An Association of Canadian Colleges and
University Teachers of English (ACCUTE)
conference in Ottawa
38Also in the meantime, various combinations of
graduate students previously and presently
involved in the projects gave talks and invited
papers to ...
- The Changing the Climate graduate conference at
the University of Saskatchewan - The English Department faculty
- The University graduate student community
- An Association of Canadian Colleges and
University Teachers of English (ACCUTE)
conference in Ottawa - Three Humanities Research Unit conferences
39Also in the meantime, various combinations of
graduate students previously and presently
involved in the projects gave talks and invited
papers to ...
- The Changing the Climate graduate conference at
the University of Saskatchewan - The English Department faculty
- The University graduate student community
- An Association of Canadian Colleges and
University Teachers of English (ACCUTE)
conference in Ottawa - Three Humanities Research Unit conferences
- Graduate hypertext courses
40By the end of last summer (2001) Joel Deshaye
and I had mostly finished the Sound and Fury
website.(It was recently recognized as one of
the five best scholarly Faulkner sites on the
WWW.)
41In the last three years, four of the graduate
students who collaborated on these hypertext
projects wrote theses and dissertations on
hypertext-related work
- Corey Owen, A Hypertext Edition of the Seafarer
(M.A. 1999) - Jon Bath, The Well-Coded Urn Authorial Design
in the Hypertext Fiction of Stuart Moulthrop and
Michael Joyce (M.A. 2000) - Maria Truchan-Tataryn, Benjy Resurrected The
Deconstruction of the Idiot in The Sound and the
Fury (M.A. 2000) - Allison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg Aspects
and Origins of the Postmodern Man-Machine
Metaphor (Ph.D. 2001)
42Along the way we learned that
- A good literary hypertext edition will recognize
what advantage there is to its existence that
is, it will be developed with a full
understanding of what it provides that a
book-based critical edition does not or cannot.
It will not be developed simply because the
opportunity is there to create a hypertext
edition. Instead, it will be developed because
something significant to our understanding of the
text will be yielded.
43Joel Deshaye and I turned all of that into a
talk titled The Visual Display of Literary
Complexity in a Hypertext Critical Edition of
William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury
- University of Regina invited lecture, April 2001
- NYU Conference of the Association for Computing
in the Humanities invited paper, June 2001
44About four years ago, when Corey Owen and Jon
Bath and I were designing the Frankenstein site
we began to think about the page ...
- Werent we simply reproducing the two-dimensional
page on the computer? - Shouldnt the computer be able to create a
writing space that is different from the paper
page as we know it?
45Who better qualified to re-think the concept of
the page than graduate and undergraduate
students? While Ive been reading books ...
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47The students have been PLAYING COMPUTER
GAMES!
48This idea about the page resulted in
- A collaborative talk to a Humanities Research
Unit conference at the U of S by Allison Muri
(Ph.D. candidate), Jon Bath (M.A. candidate),
Andrew Taylor (English prof) and me on the
history and future of the page
49This idea about the page resulted in
- A collaborative talk to a Humanities Research
Unit conference at the U of S by Allison Muri
(Ph.D. candidate), Jon Bath (M.A. candidate),
Andrew Taylor (English prof) and me on the
history and future of the page - The creation of a scholarly website on the
history and future of the page Architectures,
Ideologies and Materials of the Page (AIM)
50This idea about the page resulted in
- A collaborative talk to a Humanities Research
Unit conference at the U of S by Allison Muri
(Ph.D. candidate), Jon Bath (M.A. candidate),
Andrew Taylor (English prof) and me on the
history and future of the page - The creation of a scholarly website on the
history and future of the page Architectures,
Ideologies and Materials of the Page (AIM) - A conference called The Future of the Page
51This idea about the page resulted in
- A collaborative talk to a Humanities Research
Unit conference at the U of S by Allison Muri
(Ph.D. candidate), Jon Bath (M.A. candidate),
Andrew Taylor (English prof) and me on the
history and future of the page - The creation of a scholarly website on the
history and future of the page Architectures,
Ideologies and Materials of the Page (AIM) - A conference called The Future of the Page FOP
site - A book of essays (including two by graduate
students) on The Future of the Page appearing
shortly with U of T Press
52The University has the goal of "supporting and
facilitating individual, collaborative and
multi-disciplinary research by cultivating a
productive research climate at the University of
Saskatchewan."
- "Increasing Research Intensiveness at the U of S"
(Research Committee of Council, Feb. 2000)
53"In a university, an obligation rests on every
individual faculty member to embody the role of
teacher-scholar by participating in research and
scholarly activity and by engaging students
through instruction. No faculty member can opt
out of either task."
- "Increasing Research Intensiveness at the U of S"
54The profound interrelation of teaching and
research can be highlighted and encouraged by the
University, as adopted in the teacher-scholar
model. Ways of doing this include
- encouraging faculty members to involve students,
both undergraduate and graduate, in their
research. - identifying research themes that extend across
disciplines and draw on the research strengths of
many sectors of the University.
55Hypertext activities in the English Department
have
- Permitted and encouraged collaborative work among
graduate students, undergraduate students and
faculty
56Hypertext activities in the English Department
have
- Permitted and encouraged collaborative work among
graduate students, undergraduate students and
faculty - Involved graduate and undergraduate students in
the creation of scholarly and pedagogical sites
that are still accessed by thousands of users
each month
57Hypertext activities in the English Department
have
- Permitted and encouraged collaborative work among
graduate students, undergraduate students and
faculty - Involved graduate and undergraduate students in
the creation of scholarly and pedagogical sites
that are still accessed by thousands of users
each month - Joined in a genuine way the unique skills of
graduate students, undergraduates and faculty
(including, as well, Prof. Lisa Vargo and Allison
Muri)
58Hypertext activities in the English Department
have
- Permitted and encouraged collaborative work among
graduate students, undergraduate students and
faculty - Involved graduate and undergraduate students in
the creation of scholarly and pedagogical sites
that are still accessed by thousands of users
each month - Joined in a genuine way the unique skills of
graduate students, undergraduates and faculty - Provided a way for graduate students and faculty
to present significant research results at
conferences
59Hypertext activities in the English Department
have
- Permitted and encouraged collaborative work among
graduate students, undergraduate students and
faculty - Involved graduate and undergraduate students in
the creation of scholarly and pedagogical sites
that are still accessed by thousands of users
each month - Joined in a genuine way the unique skills of
graduate students, undergraduates and faculty - Provided a way for graduate students and faculty
to present significant research results at
conferences - Provided a way for graduate students and faculty
to co-author papers
60Collaborative work has also encouraged students
to ...
- Be skeptical of what they hear me say from the
front of a more traditional classroom