A Side Note

Before I delve into discussion of the content and topics in this chapter of Writing Space I’d like to note just one more way in which the advent of hypertext and the World Wide Web is affecting how I function. On page 56 of Writing Space Bolter mentions the idea of "ekphrasis." He somewhat defines the idea/concept, but I found myself scratching my head and wondering exactly what it was that he (Bolter) was talking about. My solution? I’d look-up the information on the web. First I went to an on-line dictionary (www.dictionary.com) and typed in "exphrasis." The search came back with no matches, but many "suggestions" of words that I might have been trying to type. I then went to an on-line encyclopedia (www.encyclopedia.com) and again my search came back with no results. My next step was to try the on-line version of the Encyclopedia Britannica (www.britannica.com) and again, no results. My last search was a "Ask Jeeves" (www.askjeeves.com) and, you’ve guessed the result: nothing found. So I decided to resort to an old-fashioned method of looking for meaning: I took down my incredibly bulky and heavy The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Ninth Edition off the top shelf of one of my bookcases, broke out the magnifying glass, and started flipping the almost transparently-thin pages. The result? The OED goes from "ekphore" to "ektene". So I went back to the Internet and went searching for a Greek dictionary. I went to my favorite search engine (www.dogpile.com) and entered the phrase "greek+dictionary" and was directed to "The Perseus Project – Ancient Greek Lexicon" (www.perseus.tufts.edu) where I entered the word "ekphrasis." The result: "ekphra^sis , eôs, hê, description, D.H.Rh.10.17 (pl.), Luc.Hist.Conscr. 20, Hermog.Prog.10, Aphth.Prog.12, etc.; title of works descriptive of works of art, as that of Callistratus." I don’t know if I am now more confused or more enlightened (or a bit of both). I do know that I have managed to "dawdle" on this subject for about 20 minutes, when I should have been working more on this Response.

Now Onto the "Meat" of the Response

I really appreciated the historical background of the interaction of print and visual graphics given by Bolter in Chapter 4. The historical background effectively "set the stage", at least for myself, as he started discussing the movement, especially in hypertext but also occurring in printed documents, of using more and more graphics to represent concepts that before would have been conveyed in print.

On page 49 of Writing Space, under the chapter subheading titled "The Image and the Printed Page", Bolter writes:

As I read this passage I immediately wondered if this instability was limited to "American" published documents, or if this instability was also apparent in documents produced in other countries. Perhaps this instability is only occurring in cultures/countries where there is increased emphasis and reliance on hypertext and hypertextual documentation, or perhaps this is a worldwide phenomenon. Regardless of where the instability is occurring in the world, though, the point remains hat Bolter is accurate in his statement. I can think of many journals, magazines, and other publications that I have subscribed to over a period of many years, and during this time-span there seems to have been a movement away from the text-concentration to more graphical-concentration, at least in some of the documents. For example, the Dystonia Dialogue is a medical journal published quarterly, with an audience ranging from researchers in the medical field to people who provide funding to support research, to patients and their families with the disorder. During the past six years, since I have been receiving the Dialogue I have noticed a marked increase in the number of graphical elements included in the pages of the document. Specifically, there has been a great increase in the number of charts used to convey statistical information, such as the number of patients with the disorder compared to the number of patients with other neurological disorders, and so forth. Before, these statistics would have been represented in text. However, the use of charts provides for a clearer, more accurate means of conveying important information. The "instability" between text and graphics is evident in other documents, too, with some magazines/journals adding more sidebars and other graphical elements to make the page more visually enticing, and with some seeming to ban all the most essential graphical elements in order to keep the emphasis on the printed word.

Something not addressed in Chapter 4, perhaps because it was overlooked, perhaps because Bolter will address it in the future, perhaps because of space constraints, or perhaps because the author does not feel it is important, is the idea that movement toward more graphical elements (both on the web and in printed documents) can leave behind those in the population who are visually impaired. In April of this year, the federal government decided that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), with the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998, specifically, Section 508, meant that all federal websites must conform to certain accessibility guidelines. (For more information, download the document located at:

http://www.ucf.edu/access/data/Section%20508%20handoutpercent201-22-01.doc

for further information and more links.) Basically, Section 508 says that all graphics included in federally-funded publications, specifically those that are hypertextually-based, need to be designed so that they can be "read" through the use of screen readers, automated audible output devices, and Braille translators and printers. Therefore, if you want to include a nifty graphic showing some statistical comparison on your webpage, you need to also include text that thoroughly describes that graphic, and to code the information in a manner that means it can be "read" by the special devices. Section 508 is now being applied by many state and local governments as well, the result being that if you or your organization receives funds from one of these sources, and publish information/documentation as a result of receiving these funds, your documentation must conform to the standards.

I have been running into the problem, as a technical communications independent contractor, that when I am hired to design a website and the organization does fall under Section 508 (federal, state, or locally), I have to explain, repeatedly, to my employers why the site is going to be more complicated to design than it might have been before Section 508 was enforced. With the increased complications in coding the site comes increased time in actually writing the code, as well as testing and re-testing to ensure that the site conforms to the requirements, resulting in a more expensive site for the organization. Many organizations balk at the additional costs and choose to either create a much smaller site than was originally planned, or to not conform to the requirements. One organization that I worked for paid a large amount of money for a "professional" to design their site. However, when I was brought in to re-write/code/organize the site, for conformance, I discovered that the original coding was so shoddy that I needed to re-write, from scratch, the entire document. With the cost being so outrageous (and the organization being frustrated at having to pay for the "same site" twice) the organization eventually elected to not have a website at all and to not publish anything electronically.

So what is the moral here? Is it possible to design sites, using many graphical elements that greatly enhance the usability of the sites, and still make them accessible to those who are visually impaired? Perhaps the answer is in designing "parallel" sites – one that is graphically enhanced and one that is purely text-based. Or maybe the answer is in developing newer and better technologies that can translate graphical information into audio or Braille so it can be understood by someone who is visually impaired. I do not truly know. What I do know, though, is that this matter is going to become more and more important until some conventions are settled upon and then enforced.

Before going into my response to Chapter 5, I would like to make a note of the fact that on page 93 of Writing Space Bolter makes mention of the Perseus Project, which I had accessed during my reading of Chapter 4 of the book.

In Chapter 5 of Writing Space I was immediately taken with the whole discussion and history of Encyclopedias and organizing information, especially the idea of remediating the printed encyclopedia. The first computer I ever bought, on my own (having grown-up using a dear little Apple IIe that I now wince when I though about how limited it was) was a Packard-Bell 486SX. The first night I had it home and set it up, I decided to check-out the bundled "Encyclopedia" that came with the machine. I inserted the CD-ROM (first time I had ever worked with one) and was off and running. First thing I looked-up, near as I can recall, was related to the presidency of John F. Kennedy. I remember the information coming-up on the screen, with some icons set-off to the side (or maybe "below" the text on the screen.) I clicked on one of these icons and all of a sudden a small screen appeared, my computer froze for a moment or two (and I was certain that I’d "broken it") and then, magically, an image of JFK appeared in the small screen. He was speaking and moving, sound was coming from my speakers, and I could hear some of the words from his inauguration speech. I was dumbfounded. This was so much more than I had ever expected from a computer. After playing and replaying the speech I began to seek out other "movies" in the Encyclopedia CD – I watched and re-watched the Hindenburg crash, heard Dr. Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, saw footage of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface – I didn’t sleep that night. Literally, a new world had been opened for me; the idea that computers could do so much…and from such a little CD-ROM!

Two things upset me, though, when I was exploring the CD-ROM. First, little of the information was hyperlinked (though at the time I was not even really sure what hyperlinking really was.) On the page about JFK, there was mention of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, but those words were not linked to other entries in the Encyclopedia about those topics. (In retrospect I think that this "oversight" was simply because it was a new technology and many of the possibilities were still being evaluated.) The other thing that bothered me, and still does to a great extent, was the idea that I could not really "browse" through the Encyclopedia in the same manner in which I would with a printed text. With a printed Encyclopedia, I tend to flip pages, sometimes several at a time, scanning and browsing for something interesting. With the CD-ROM Encyclopedia, I had to know what I was looking for in order to find that information. Yes, I could "search" by the indexing was still balky. I remember looking-up "Nuremberg" for information on the Nuremberg Trials, and coming back with information on the town, but not about the Trials…I actually needed to put in the whole text "Nuremberg Trial" to find the information. With better indexing, this problem seems to have been remedied in more recent versions of electronic Encyclopedias. The inability for the reader to "flip and scan" through the information is still a drawback of the electronic Encyclopedia, though.

The other item in Chapter 5 that I would like to comment on is the idea of "Digital Libraries" (page 93) and some of the challenges in organizing the information contained in them. Bolter writes that "…[t]he electronic library is already decades old, in the sense there have been bibliographic and textual databases since the 1970s." (page 93) Bolter then does on to discuss some of the challenges of making this information available to the public and the challenge of indexing and organizing the information so that it is accessible. I know that this is one of the challenges that hypertext is facing right now: lots of information has been "captured" (i.e. gathered and put into digital format) but it is not always accessible. One of the projects I have been working on is a proposal to NASA to revamp a gigantic database of digital information and to organize the information into a "Knowledge Repository" where each "element" is searchable by many different means. For example, an interview with Gene Cernan (the last man to leave his footprints on the moon) might be made "searchable" by indexing it as "interview", as "Cernan", as "Apollo 17", as "Apollo", as "Lunar Missions", as "Astronaut", and so forth. A search string with any one of these key words or key terms would come-up with a hypertext link to the interview (in "text" format or as an .avi file or as an audio file.) In a meeting I was recently at, one of the NASA representatives said (and I am paraphrasing here):

In other words, NASA (and other organizations) need a clear manner in which to organize all of their information. Each organization is approaching the problem from the same desire, but every organization is using a different means of achieving the desired end result. Some organizations already apply standard indexing practices (much like the Dewey Decimal System) and others are working with more innovative ideas, such as Concept Maps. (Information about Concept Mapping can be found at: http://ihmc.uwf.edu).

There has been some movement toward developing an all-inclusive means of organizing information in databases through the Department of Defense’s Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) (http://www.adlnet.org). However, SCORM-conformance and programming is still being tested and initially implemented. Once it has been "proven" to be effective the next challenge will be to expand the program so that it is used on an international level, with all information being organized in the same manner, no matter where it originates. I do not know if this is possible, though, as I think that there will always be individuals and organizations who prefer to organize their hypertexts according to their own theories of indexing.

As I began reading Chapter 6 of Writing Space I found that I was thinking about the hypertext document that Hayley had shown to the class (http://www.mindspring.com/~walter/1.html) and how that "novella" was designed to be read in a somewhat non-linear form. By this I mean that the author had included hyperlinks to various parts and tangents within the story. However, the novella is not truly "non-linear" in that eventually the reader reaches "The End" although they may have taken a path different from another reader to reach that same point. The author of the novella was still working within a "start to finish" framework, and included hypertextual links when he wanted to afford the reader with some sense of being "non-linear." However, these hyperlinks were carefully placed and directed the reader toward some nugget of information that the author felt was relevant at "that point/that time" in the story.

I began to think about creating a hypertext novella that would have the hyperlinks inserted in an all-encompassing manner. For example, every time a certain character’s name was mentioned, that text would be a hyperlink to a "page" that included links to every other point in the document where the name was written. In this way, the document would be circular in nature, continually referring back to itself. However, the reader might choose to ignore these hyperlinks and to move to the "next page" if offered that option. And that is where the author of the document would have to make a decision: would the story be offered linearly, that is moving "forward" and "backward" or would the reader be solely responsible for the navigation?

Another item that I found interesting in Chapter 6 is the idea of "Educational Dialogue". (page 113) Bolter discusses how academia, while reluctant to give-up the idea of the linear essay, has been quick to adapt many of the "educational options" offered through courses taught either completely on the web (using hypertext) or including hypertextual elements. Most of the courses I have taken in pursuing my Technical Communication education have had hypertextual elements, whether those have been on-line discussions of subjects broached during an in-class lecture or a course taught entirely on the web, where all interaction is digital. (It is interesting to note that many of the literature classes I have taken have not only not utilized hypertext, but have often been taught by instructors who "shunned" the concept of hypertext to the point of refusing to give the students the option of contacting the instructor via email. I wonder if this is a case of "embracing" new ideas vs. "ignoring" new ideas, or if it’s a commentary on the literature people feeling threatened by the new technology. I actually had a literature course that was partially web-based, though the instructor told the students, on the first day, that she "hated" technology, thought it was intimidating, and that she didn’t want to teach the course using hypertextual elements, primarily a web discussion board.)

Bolter writes, on page 115, "[e]ducators have argued that…threaded discussion groups offer students an opportunity for authentic exchange despite or even because of the fact that the student must type her messages at a keyboard and read them on a computer screen." I agree with these educators. For myself, I know that while I can reasonably hold my own in a "live/in-class" debate about some topic, I can better present my argument or point through text. Given time to think about the organization of my subject, how best to present the subject, and how to organize the document using hypertextual dialogue options allows me to better convey my information