Based on the instructions given by Professor Miller, regarding this assignment, I first looked at the book as a physical object. I looked at the cover, including the colors, the font, and how information is grouped together. One thing that stood out for me, as I looked at the book, was that the cover (front, back, and spine) looked like a webpage with frames of blue at the top and bottom, with information being "chunked" together. This chunking is very obvious on the back, with the box containing the book’s ISBN number and bar-code being set in a white box that straddles the border between the bottom blue frame and the light green and white "wallpaper". The wallpaper deserves mention, as well, as it contains "watermarks" of the book’s title, faded to the point where the text is more of a background marbling effect rather than standing out as being textual. I also found it interesting that the book’s subtitle "Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print" is set to the left and partially below and partially to the side of the main title "Writing Space". This strikes me as being an unusual placement, but much reminds me of the manner in which information is frequently grouped on a webpage, taking advantage of readers’ tendencies to "browse" rather than to read the page in a standard left to right, top to bottom manner.

I could actually spend this entire assignment writing about the elements of the book’s cover and front matter (title page, dedication, etc.) without delving into an analysis of the text, but I feel that would not be appropriate. Suffice it to say that the front matter, with its masses of white space (whole pages, in fact) works well with a printed text, but would be impossible to use in a webpage, as the audience would see only a blank screen, not realizing they must page forward" to reach the text.

As I read the Preface to Writing Space two things immediately jumped out at me: first, that I wanted to know more about the authors and works that Bolter mentioned on page xii and second, that I was frustrated by the acronyms that the author gave, without explaining, such as ACM. What I found interesting, though, and very relevant to this course, was the idea that my frustrations would have been irrelevant if this book were a hypertext document, as it is likely that those items (the authors and the acronyms) might well have been hyperlinks to further information about those key words. I think that this idea came to mind because I am now spending much of my time contemplating the positive and negative aspects of hypertext and how it is affecting my life and how I approach matters. One item that I really liked about the Preface was how Bolter has managed to create his own textual/printed version of a hyperlink using the keyboard symbols "=" and ">" together with a page number to create a link to another part of this text. This seems to me to be a very logical means of dealing with one of the limitations of print.

In the Introduction to Writing Space I was immediately taken with the idea that ". . .the idea of the book is changing". (page 3) Bolter goes on to explain how some groups are beginning to think of hypertext, or computer created and viewed text, as their primary medium. I think this is an extremely valuable point, as I run into this idea at work every day. When I first began writing proposals for space program-related organizations, I frequently worked with Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that specified that all proposal submissions had to be printed, with additional copies made available upon request. Then, a few years ago, I started seeing RFPs that requested that the proposer include an electronic copy of disk when the printed proposal was submitted. Now, especially with the National Science Foundation (NSF), all submission are electronic, even cover letters with "original signatures" must be scanned in as .pdf formats and sent along with the electronic version of the body of the proposal. While this saves on paper, printing, and shipping costs, it is difficult for me to convince some of my clients that this procedure is simplifying matters (and, as a side-note) one of my friends who works for the NSF in proposal evaluation, has told me that the reviews are not electronic; instead, many reviewers print-out copies of the proposals to review and make recommendations from.)

While there were many points in Chapter 2 that I found interesting, debatable, and which triggered many tangential thoughts, for the sake of brevity I am only going to address two of those in this pare of my Response. First is the idea of the printed book being linear in form, where as hypertext/digital text/however-you-wish-to-refer-to-web-based-publishing is more in the form of associations, where the audience moves from one related idea to another, as opposed to moving strictly forward within a printed book. (pages 20-21) I am finding myself more and more frustrated, when reading printed texts, that I do not have hyperlinks to direct me toward similar (or even exact opposite, though still related) concepts. Not just key words, mind you, but concepts or ideas. This is true only for non-fiction, printed texts, though. Non-fiction, with its references to other "facts" or ideas, seems to me to be perfectly suited to hypertextual publishing. After all, when writing a chapter about Keplerian Orbital theory, it would be appropriate to "link" to animations of different types of graphics, maybe to a brief biography of Kepler, perhaps a "timeline" of what else was happening in the world at the tome of his discoveries, and so forth. This hypertext would allow for cleaner, clearer explanations of a difficult subject matter. For all of the wonder "still" images of an orbital track that are available, it is much easier for the student to learn how an orbital track progresses by watching the movement occur. I stress that I yearn for hypertexts in non-fiction texts but not in fictional texts. When I read fiction, I want it to be linear; I want to concentrate on the words that are being woven into a story and not be distracted by external visual stimulus.

The other item in Chapter 2 that I wish to respond to is the idea that ". . .television is making such extensive use of new media that TV screens often look like pages from the World Wide Web". (page 25) Within the past three weeks, CNN’s Headline News has adopted a "new" format for its half-hour news program. This new format shrinks the "box" in which the anchor/correspondent/film of the story appears down to about ¼ of the television screen. The rest of the screen is filled with other graphical elements, including stock reports, weather forecasts, sports scores, text related to the story being covered, and text about other stories in the news at that time. This new format very much brings to mind a "cluttered" webpage, with so many visual distractions that I am unable to keep my attention on the main reason that I am at the site. Frequently I am so overwhelmed by the "noise" on a website that I will leave it without having found the information that I was seeking. This therefore results in a site that has not been particularly "fulfilling". The same holds true for the new CNN Headline News, in that I no longer watch the screen, but actually do something else while getting my morning dose of the day’s headlines. Perhaps my mind will eventually adapt to all of the visual noise, but I think that I may be in the process of being "left behind" by technological advances being applied in my world.

One of the points that I found most interesting in Chapter 3 is the idea that hypertext is merely the "correction" of some of the deficiencies found in print, rather than a "plot" to get rid of print altogether. As I noted, in my response to Chapter 2, I became frustrated by the staticness of printed texts, when they are non-fiction-based. But, I also noted in this chapter (Chapter 3) that there was not much discussion of the drawbacks of hypertext (though I am assuming that some of these will be addressed at a point further along in the book.) I feel that it is likely that at some point in the near future ("near" being with the next 100 years or so) we will probably see the end of most "printed" documents, books included. Instead, everything will be in hypertextual format. One of the current limitations to having all documents in hypertext is the ease of use provided through printed text that is not current available with hypertext. For myself, I find it tiresome to my eyes to try and read large amounts of text from a computer screen simply because the light is being broadcast/beamed into my eyes, instead of being reflected. This may seem like a small matter, but it does cause my eyes to become tired, and therefore I tend to "scan" rather than read. In fact, if something important is available in hypertextual format, and I know that I need to read it with attention to detail, I will print the document and then read it in printed format (which cleanly negates the hypertextual benefits of using hypertext formatting.) Another problem that I have noticed with hypertext documents (and I do not think to claim that these complaints are just my own . . .they are the complaints that are frequently mentioned as being the limitations of this technology) is their lack of being portable and easily accessible. By this I mean that it is difficult to carry a computer with you wherever you go. Even though there are not many wonderfully small machines that are portable, they are limited by what you can do with them (miniature keyboards are painful to use and voice recognition programs are still in the balky-stages of development). I do believe, though, that as technology begins to conquer these problems that there will be a mass movement away from printed texts and toward hypertexts