Re: email-tutoring

[Sara Kimball <skimball@uts.cc.utexas.edu>]

On Fri, 28 Feb 1997, David J. Coogan wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 28 Feb 1997, Sara Kimball wrote:
> 
> > Anyway, given the fact that wood boards can be
> > effectively sealed and clay *can* be erased, this distrust of wood seems
> > to have as much to do with cultural assumptions as it does with physical
> > constraints.
> > 
> --> This, to me, is always the most interesting, most intriguing aspect of
> technorhetoric--drawing the line between the physical constraints and the
> cultural assumptions.  I guess the typical thing to do is to background
> the cultural assumptions, as many literacy scholars did for a long time,
> attributing changes in the culture to a "revolution" of the printing
> press.  To be sure, they go hand in hand.  Yet somehow we allow ourselves
> to get realy excited about the technologies, themselves.  

Yes, it's the fascinating part to me too, and I can't always articulate it
clearly  I suppose if I could, it wouldn't be so fascinating :)  Take
something like a traditional print dictionary and compare it with an
electronic hypertext. A dictionary is a form of hypertext in that it's not
usually read in linear fashion.  Any particular part of its contents is
elaborately linked to other parts, either through explicit cross
references (e.g. boldfaced (near)-synonyms in definitions) or implicitly.
One important principle of constructing general monolingual dictionaries
is that any word used in a definition should be defined in its own place
elsewhere in the dictionary.  So how does the hypertext e.g. a Web page
differ? Is it the speed of linking?  Is it the possibility of linking to
documents outside the main text?  Note that dictionaries lend themselves
very well to be put into hypertext, and you can use links outside the
document both to elaborate on definitions with encyclopedic material and
to guide a reader to sources.  But it occurs to me that the standard
assumption that hypertext affords readers greater freedom than texts
designed to be read in linear fashion really doesn't hold here.  After
all, in reading a hypertext you're constrained by someone else's idea of
linking, but in reading a dictionary, nothing stops you from jumping off
in pursuit of any word in the definition.  Hmm, it might be kind of cool
to make a truly interactive hypertext dictionary where readers could **add*
their own links easily.  It might get pretty confusing pretty fast too if
there were many readers involved.

Sara