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Peter Stoicheff Department of English University of Saskatchewan

“The Literary Hypertext as a Version of the Teacher-Scholar Model” Fall University Teaching and Learning Institute August 30, 2002. Peter Stoicheff Department of English University of Saskatchewan. What is “hypertext” anyway?. The term was coined by Theodor Nelson in the early 1960s.

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Peter Stoicheff Department of English University of Saskatchewan

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  1. “The 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

  2. What is “hypertext” anyway? • The term was coined by Theodor Nelson in the early 1960s

  3. What 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)

  4. I became interested in the scholarly possibilities of hypertext because: • of the complexity of Ezra Pound’s Cantos

  5. The components of that complexity are: • Its “intertextuality”

  6. The components of that complexity are: • Its “intertextuality” • Its interdisciplinarity

  7. The components of that complexity are: • Its “intertextuality” • Its interdisciplinarity • Its many languages

  8. I 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)

  9. This request got me thinking about: • How my friends in the sciences work closely with other scientists

  10. This request got me thinking about: • How my friends in the sciences work closely with other scientists • How their graduate students collaborate with each other

  11. This 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 ...

  12. …while offprints in the sciences look rather like this:

  13. While 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. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

  14. I realized: • The graduate students were being under-employed doing occasional marking and library work

  15. I realized: • The graduate students were being under-employed doing occasional marking and library work • The first-year students were finding Eliot’s poem difficult because it was highly intertextual, interdisciplinary and multilingual

  16. I figured: • The graduate students would be more fulfilled if they worked together, and with me, on something ...

  17. I 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 Eliot’s intertextual poem ...

  18. I 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 Eliot’s intertextual poem … • The digital edition could be used in the first-year classroom.

  19. I 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)

  20. One of the first inspirations for the site was an image in Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information:Prufrock

  21. Encouragedby 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 Shelley’s 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

  22. That 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.

  23. That article’s 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.

  24. In a graduate course the following year (1998) we designed a hypertext edition of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury because … its narrative structure is very complex.

  25. That 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.

  26. The 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

  27. Meanwhile ... • The T.S. Eliot site was getting 1,500 hits per month

  28. Meanwhile ... • 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)

  29. Meanwhile ... • 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

  30. Meanwhile ... • 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.

  31. Also 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

  32. Also 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

  33. Also 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

  34. Also 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

  35. Also 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

  36. Also 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

  37. By 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.)

  38. In 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)

  39. Along 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.

  40. Joel Deshaye and I turned all of that into a talk titled “The Visual Display of Literary Complexity in a Hypertext Critical Edition of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury” • University of Regina invited lecture, April 2001 • NYU Conference of theAssociation for Computing in the Humanitiesinvited paper, June 2001

  41. About four years ago, when Corey Owen and Jon Bath and I were designing the Frankenstein site we began to think about the page ... • Weren’t we simply reproducing the two-dimensional page on the computer? • Shouldn’t the computer be able to create a writing space that is different from the paper page as we know it?

  42. Who better qualified to re-think the concept of the page than graduate and undergraduate students? While I’ve been reading books ...

  43. The students have been … PLAYING COMPUTER GAMES!

  44. This 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

  45. This 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)

  46. This 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”

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