From Manuscripts to Microchips
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Helen Sword In the fall of 1995, Professor Jerome McGann delivered a Patten lecture at Indiana University entitled "Radiant Textuality." A versatile editor, scholar, and Web pioneer, McGann introduced and demonstrated the Dante Gabriel Rossetti hypertext archive that was then being developed under his initiation and supervision at the University of Virginia (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti/rossetti.html). What especially impressed me about the lecture was not so much the material presented – I had already browsed through the Web site myself a few days earlier and was thus familiar with its contents – as the audience's reaction to it. When McGann projected a facsimile of Rossetti's famous painting, The Blessed Damozel, up on the screen, the assembled academics murmured appreciatively. This was 1995, after all, and the myriad offerings of the World Wide Web were still as unfamiliar to most of my English Department colleagues as terms like "hypertext" and "hot link." The most notable response of the evening, however, was reserved not for Rossetti's paintings but for his poetry. When McGann projected a high-quality digitized facsimile of a manuscript page, an audible gasp went up from the scholarly audience, who recognized at once the research potential of a technological medium that would allow materials usually locked in academic archives to be made readily available to anyone anywhere with a computer and a network connection. The audience response to McGann's talk made me aware both of the accuracy and the irony of its title, which alludes not only to the literal radiance of texts displayed on a computer screen but also, I take it, to their "aura," the quality of awe that they inspire in the viewer. Walter Benjamin, in an influential 1955 essay, defined the aura as a numinous, almost mystical quality derived from the uniqueness of certain art objects and religious relics. The aura is what makes people to flock to the Louvre, for instance, to see the original Mona Lisa, even when – indeed, especially when – they might easily view a reproduction in all the comfort of home. For literary scholars, not surprisingly, manuscripts and other original texts possess an aura at least as powerful as that of any famous work of visual art; indeed, as McGann's lecture made apparent, they seem to retain some measure of this aura even when reproduced online, in a way that, for instance, paintings do not. This is due at least in part, no doubt, to the fact that mass-reproduced manuscript facsimiles are still a relative rarity, whereas we are used to seeing visual reproductions of other kinds of art everywhere around us: Monet's water lilies on dorm room walls, Escher's interlocking fish and birds on neckties, Michelangelo's David on refrigerator magnets. According to Benjamin, the aura diminishes in inverse proportion to an art form's reproducibility. A film print, for instance, has no aura at all, although the movie-going experience takes on compensatory elements of a religious ritual, and cinema stars often become fetishized as quasi-holy relics in their own rights. In an era characterized by mechanical reproductions on a scale not even imagined by Benjamin four decades ago, the aura, it seems, should be a thing of the past, a phenomenon confined to museums and private collections but absent almost by definition from such venues of popular culture as television and, more recently, the World Wide Web. But the reaction to McGann's lecture got me wondering. If, as we make our inevitable, all-too-hasty transition from a print culture to a digital one, literary artifacts such as manuscripts are doomed eventually to lose their aura – such loss being, as Benjamin argues, a direct function of their ready reproducibility – how might I turn this loss into a pedagogical gain? How might I use textual resources such as the Rossetti archive to convey not only the benefits but also the pitfalls of computer culture? Even more importantly, how might I employ the latest in computer technology, which all too often fetishizes technology itself, to teach students the uses and value of physical libraries and material texts? How, in other words, might I exploit the whiz-bang wonders of the Web to spark students' enthusiasm for the slow-paced, dusty, exhilarating world of books? Within days after McGann's lecture, I applied for (and eventually received) an Instructional Development Fellowship from I.U.'s Office of Academics Affairs. The grant allowed me to spend two summer months designing a freshman literature course that would focus on the ways in which changing publication technologies, from the printing press to the digital revolution, affect how we read, write, and produce textual meaning. Students would read literary works in a wide variety of formats -- manuscripts, facsimiles, fine printed books, literary magazines, first editions, commercial anthologies, college textbooks, and hypertexts – and learn to take into account visual, textual, and other material factors in their analyses and interpretations. In keeping with the course's emphasis on the relationship between material form and intellectual content, the writing assignments, too, would employ a range of textual forms, from essays produced collaboratively via e-mail to poems inked by hand on fine paper. L141 "From Manuscripts to Microchips," which I taught for the first time in Fall 1997 to nearly one hundred I.U. freshmen, was a highly successful course in some respects, less successful in others. Some of the inevitable problems had to do with reading assignments that the students founds impenetrable, writing assignments that they found frustrating or boring, and other elements that had little to do specifically with the course's emphasis on textual issues or its use of instructional computing. In this paper, I shall confine my discussion to those aspects of the course that had a specifically technological component, such as my development of a Web-based syllabus, my experiences with teaching hypertext fiction, and my use of instructional CD-ROMs in the classroom. Because "From Manuscripts to Microchips" was itself about changing modes of publication technology, it made sense for me to employ the latest publication technology – i.e., the Web – in my design and distribution of the course materials. I therefore constructed an elaborate on-line syllabus, complete with hypertext links to, from, and among assignments and Web resources. (This syllabus can be viewed at http://www.indiana.edu/~l141/syllabus.html). The site contained no splashy graphics – I had no time to master more than the basics of HTML – but I did employ different background colors and textures for virtually every page, a perfectly appropriate visual indulgence, I felt, given the course's emphasis on creative interactions of text and context. One advantage of an on-line syllabus, I had assumed, would be that I could fine-tune it, add materials, and make other changes as the semester progressed. I quickly discovered, however, that while some students had daily access to the Web from personal computers in their dorm rooms or apartments, many others relied exclusively on university computer clusters, where they often had to wait in long lines simply in order to log on. These students printed out all the course materials at the beginning of the semester and resented having to monitor frequent changes to the Web site. The first important lesson I learned, then, was that on-line syllabi cannot serve as substitutes for print syllabi except in specific situations (such as computing classes or distance learning) where all students have equally reliable, frequent, and easy access to network connections. Another lesson I learned was that, despite the glib familiarity with computers that most of the freshmen in the class seemingly possessed, very few of them were in fact at all sophisticated about digital culture. For the most part, they had very little idea how to evaluate Web resources and absolutely no idea how to negotiate a literary hypertext. While hypertext theorists often extol the principle of readerly control – the reader of a hypertext, in other words, can choose the links he or she wants to follow rather than being directed through the narrative by the author – most students, I found, felt confused to the point of frustration when set loose in a hypertextual story with no clear beginning, middle, or end, such as Matthew Miller’s TRIP (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v007/7.1miller.html) or Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v007/7.3joyce.html). [Editor’s note: these resources are accessible from network connections at universities which subscribe to Project Muse, a Johns Hopkins electronic journal service. Indiana University subscribes; not all institutions do so.] It was, one student told me, rather like being set down in a dark forest with no compass, no flashlight, and no map: in theory, one can choose which way to go; in practice, one has no way of making an informed choice about how to proceed. I did my best, of course, to exploit the pedagogical potential of the situation by urging my students to analyze their own confusion, to draw analogies between the experience of reading a literary hypertext and that of making one's way through the multicultural, transnational, information-overloaded society in which we live. In addition, I built several assignments into the course that required my students not only to find resource materials on the Web but also to analyze the content and evaluate the intellectual authority of the sites they visited. Next time I teach the course, however, I will assume an even lower level of computer-cultural literacy than I did the first time around. A third lesson I learned was that not every hypertext is a good hypertext; academic publishers, in particular, seem to be jumping onto the hypertext bandwagon without thinking very carefully about their products. When I was designing the course, I was excited to find that W. W. Norton had just published an instructional CD-ROM linked to the Norton Anthology of Poetry and that Eastgate Publications had recently produced a hypertext version of Eliot's Waste Land. Both of these CD-ROMs turned out to be not only prohibitively expensive (I could not in good conscience require my students to buy them, at $30 and $50, respectively) but also so badly conceived and executed that I was able to use both hypertexts as negative examples of how a sophisticated publication technology does not necessarily guarantee a sophisticated literary product. In fact, one of my most successful class sessions involved an in-class demonstration of the Norton CD-ROM; projecting various pages onto a large screen from a university-supplied laptop, I asked my students to describe and analyze the hypertext’s weaknesses. This proved distressingly easy to do: from the ugly typeface to the poor navigational aids to the mini-lectures delivered by a "talking head" who seemed almost a caricature of a thunderously boring professor (in fact, it was the CD-ROM's editor and designer), this supposed instructional aid replicated all the shortcomings of any print anthology and added a few new ones to boot. The Waste Land CD-ROM was even worse: although touted as a guide through a disjunctive, disorienting poem that itself functions as a kind of proto-hypertext, it turned out to be visually uninventive, clumsy to navigate, and not even particularly illuminating as a commentary on the poem. Other, better literary resources are bound to appear on the market and the Web in the next few years – for instance, wonderfully imaginative and visually rich hypertext versions of Dante's Inferno and James Joyce's Ulysses are now under development – but for the moment, caveat emptor. Other lessons that I learned from the course were more positive and uplifting: virtually anyone, I discovered, can master new technologies when given adequate time and logistical support. As someone with no formal training in computing, little mechnical aptitude, and even less technological self-confidence – I'm the kind of person who still has trouble working overhead projectors and VCRs – I had seriously doubted my own ability to cope gracefully with all the hardware and software involved in designing and especially in teaching the course. These fears proved to be largely unfounded, above all because of the exemplary support network offered by Indiana University. A consultant from the Teaching and Learning Technologies Laboratories spent hours helping me design my Web site, explaining the arcana of HTML, and teaching me to scan and manipulate graphical images. The staff at Instructional Support Services ensured that I had all the equipment I needed whenever I needed it and briefed me repeatedly and at length on how to use it. Most importantly, I quickly learned that ISS staff would appear within minutes, as if by magic, whenever I had to summon them for help while I was in the midst of teaching a class. Such glitches occurred, I regret to say, just as frequently as I had feared they would; with time, however, I have become at least somewhat more adept at solving them on my own. Indeed, the most important lesson I have learned from developing L141 is that the investment of time and energy required to learn about new computer resources can pay off over and over again in other teaching situations: now I think nothing of setting up a visual Web archive for my undergraduate mythology class or of helping my graduate seminar on literary modernism produce an online annotated bibliography. The good news, then, is that even a technophobe like me, given plenty of material support – time, equipment, helpful and attentive staff – need not fear the latest instructional technologies. The bad news, of course, is that most secondary schools, community colleges, and even state universities cannot necessarily offer their teachers the degree of support that I was privileged to receive at I.U. Bloomington. The high-tech world is still very much allied with the world of economic prosperity and market forces, a loop that leaves many educational institutions out in the cold. The good side to this bad news, however, is that the most intellectually engaging instructional techniques remain, in the end, low-tech; computers and Web resources can enhance good teaching, but they are no substitute for it. Although my various uses of instructional technology no doubt made my "From Manuscripts to Microchips" course a more interesting one, its most effective lessons, I believe, were those that had nothing at all to do with computers, except perhaps by negative contrast. One especially successful assignment required each student to spend an hour on his or her own looking at rare books at the Lilly Library. The purpose of the exercise was not only to expose the students to an exciting and underused I.U. resource but also to put them directly in touch with the aura – the materiality, the visual inventiveness, the individuality – of books. Equally successful was the final course project, which asked each student to produce his or her own book. The text and images did not have to be original, but the project had to bring together textual and visual elements in creative and innovative ways. The results of this assignment were nothing short of spectacular: produced in a range of sizes and shapes using an extraordinary variety of materials, the students' book projects evinced a creative energy and enthusiasm of a kind I have rarely observed in the undergraduate classroom, where intellectual apathy is all too often the order of the day. Indeed, what Jerome McGann calls the "radiant textuality" of computer images – Rossetti's manuscript page projected on the screen, vividly glowing and readily accessible to the masses – seems dim and lifeless compared to the radiance of these minor masterpieces, which proclaim that, as the millenium that produced Gutenberg draws to a close, physical books can still set the imagination alight. References
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