Dear Colleague,

Recently, I wrote to you describing a hypermedia studies workshop that I was proposing to the Mellon Committee. The Committee has graciously agreed to fund that workshop, which is still scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, August 3 and 4th. The room is still to be determined.

A large number of faculty and staff signed up for the workshop. These include Vicki Bently-Condit, Anthropology; Gail Bonath, Library; Tony Crowley, Art; Leslie Czechowski, Library; Sandy Goldberg, Philosophy; Pip Gordon, Theatre; Judy Hunter, Writing Lab; Jean Ketter, Education; Marci Sortor, History; Susan Strauber, Art; M. Dale Streigle, Biology; Rebecca Stuhr, Library; David Weaver, Library; and Royce Wolf, Mathematics. Because of the number of participants, we may break up into small groups during parts of the workshop.

While I am facilitating this workshop, I hope that it will be like the teaching workshops in which I've participated; we will come together as equals, sharing our own thoughts, ideas, and experiences.

Since it is a two-day workshop, the committee is providing a stipend of $260 for each participant (2/5 of the standard five-day stipend). The committee would like a report from each participant about how effective the workshop was and how it impacted thinking about technology and teaching. [Staff members are treated differently; I'll admit that I'm not sure whether they receive a stipend or whether they're expected to provide a report.]

You can find the proposal at http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebelsky/Institution/Hypermedia/proposal.july1998.html

You can find the committee's response at http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebelsky/Institution/Hypermedia/funding.summer1998.html

I think the workshop will be more successful if we can do some reading in advance of the workshop. I'll be ordering the primary text early next week and (hopefully) distributing some photocopied readings soon thereafter. [I believe that the service bureau is only open on Thursdays, and I hope to get things to them next week.] To permit a wider variety of perspectives without burdening participants, I am hoping to use a few core readings and then a variety of supplemental readings, with each participant selecting his or her own supplemental readings (with each supplemental reading read by one to three participants).

It's likely that we'll use George Landow's "Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology" as our primary text. You are not expected to read the whole text before the workshop :-), but I expect that it will be useful as a resource afterwards.

For some background on the technology, I'll be distributing two chapters of Jakob Nielsen's "Multimedia and Hypertext." One gives a definition of hypertext, the other a history of hypertext.

I'm still working on determining appropriate supplemental readings, but "Hypermedia and Literary Studies", edited by Paul Delany and George Landow, appears to be a good starting place with a wide variety of articles. Here are some chapters that some of you might find of interest. Let me know which ones you would like copies of (or more information on).

• Landow, George P. "The Rhetoric of Hypermedia: Some Rules for Authors". pp. 81-103. Landow is professor of Literary Studies at Brown.

• Bolter, Jay David. "Topographic Writing: Hypertext and the Electronic Writing Space." pp. 105-118. Bolter is a professor of classics at UNC.

• Moulthrop, Stuart. "Reading From the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of 'Forking Paths'". pp. 119-132. Moulthrop is (was?) on the faculty at UT Austin and is also the author of some key hypertexts. The paper reflects on Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths" and Moulthrop's experiences in making it more of a hypertext.

• Dickey, William. "Poem Descending a Staircase: Hypertext and the Simultaneity of Experience." pp. 143-152. Dickey notes that "[his] purpose in this paper is to suggest that in the computer, and especially in such compute applications, or environments, as hypertext, the late twentieth century has been provided with a tool for artistic composition which admits, but encourages, several of the concerns of of contemporary art that I have mentioned [in a lengthy introduction]."

• Slatin, John. "Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium". pp. 153-169. I haven't read this yet, but it appears to be another article on the rhetoric of hypertext.

• DeRose, Steven J. "Biblical Studies and Hypertext". pp. 186-204. It appears that DeRose is more of a technologist than an academician. He reports on the applicability of hypertext for supporting biblical studies through better organization and accessibility.

• Crane, Gregory and Mylonas, Elli. "Ancient Materials, Modern Media: Shaping the Study of Classics with Hypermedia". pp. 205-220. Crane and Mylonas, both in the department of classics at Harvard (at least at the time this paper was written), are the primary architects of Project Perseus, an enormous hypermedia repository on ancient Greece.

• Kahn, Paul. "Linking Together Books: Experiments in Adapting Published Material into Intermedia Documents". pp. 221-256. In spite of the somewhat dry title, it appears that this article bears some similarity to the DeRose article, this time taking classical Chinese literature as the subject matter (and discussing how one takes not just the primary texts, but the numerous commentaries, and places them in a coherent and usable whole).

• Friedlander, Larry. "The Shakespeare Project: Experiments in Multimedia". pp. 257-271. Friedlander uses hypermedia to help students understand that plays are not just texts that are read, but also performed. In his introduction, he suggests that one of his goals is to let students share in the process of theatrical construction. [I'll admit I haven't read beyond the introduction.]

• Graham, David. "The Emblematic Hyperbook: Using HyperCard on Emblem Books". pp. 273-286. Related to the DeRose and Kahn articles, but using a primarily visual rather than a primary textual medium. Graham writes about his sources: "The emblem book, as it most often appeared in Europe from about 1531 to 1684, was an assemblage of pictures and related short texts [...]."

• Cumming, Alister and Sinclair, Gerri. "Conceptualizing Hypermedia Curricula for Literary Studies in Schools". [Haven't gotten to it yet, might become a "core" reading.]

If you have other core or supplemental readings to suggest, I'd appreciate hearing about them.

I hope to send along more information on readings and a rough schedule sometime next week.

Looking forward to working with you,

• - Sam Rebelsky