HUM 298 Course Guide
Please Note Grading of student writing will reflect standard English usage. The Modern Language Association's (MLA) bibliographic style is generally used at Medaille.
Syllabus Evaluation || Texts Special
Requirements
Catalog Description of Course This course examines hypertext, the foundation technology of the World Wide Web. Are electronic media, and hypertext especially, driving a major cultural transformation? Must what some call "the secondary orality of the Electronic Age" inevitably transform not only the study of art and culture but the forms and functions of art and culture as well? The course's emphasis on navigation and interactivity shows the opportunities afforded by hypertext for humans to communicate in new as well as old forms. In this course, you design large-scale knowledge spaces containing words and other symbols to express yourselves as well as inform, train, entertain, and persuade. Building on writing skills, you will study models and current practices of information visualization. You will explore these knowledge spaces and build and maintain your own to demonstrate the values of readability, accessibility, and community-building underlying them.
Objectives After completing this course, you will be better able to control the content, structure, language, and mechanics of the hypertext construction that professionals do on computer networks. Specifically, you will be better able to: Content
Structure
Language
Mechanics
Course Content I'm not sure how to measure this, but I strongly suspect that the time Americans spend reading words on paper is not growing. Before the Internet came to prominence, the U.S. led all nations in book title production. Now, we're fifth and falling. Yet according to the Publishers Marketing Association, there have never been more publishing companies. That seems contradictory until you learn that Harper-Collins, one of the biggest, has cut the number of titles it publishes from 1,600 to 1,000 and that the little publishers that have cropped up publish few titles. It takes a lot of them to produce the 600 titles that Harper has rejected. I am positive, however, that if you include online activity, reading is indeed growing. So is writing. And digital publishing is exploding. TV viewing, not surprisingly, is down.
Hypertext, it seems, is easy to learn, is easy to navigate, and is suddenly wildly popular. Why? What gives hypertext those qualities? What are the implications for education, entertainment, and commerce? Is there a future for the paper book? In this course, we'll answer those questions. We'll analyze hypertexts, the history of texts and hypertexts, the hypertext development process, the role of hypertext in our culture, and the promises and perils of hypertext for the future. Rather than structure the course around a textbook, I'm structuring the course around a project. I've found it works better if everyone writes on the same general theme. You have access to some terrific software and to the Internet and World Wide Web, so I've chosen the theme: Challenging the Digital
Future Because hypertext is new to you, I'm recommending that you start with what you know -- paper documents -- and repurpose them into hypertext. Because most hypertexts are team projects, I'm recommending that you work in teams of two or three. Teamwork
Class Time (see syllabus)
Concepts and Skills
Textbook Nielsen, Jakob. Hypermedia and hypertext: the Internet and beyond. New York:
Ap Professional, 1995. Yes, we will use a dead-tree version of a textbook for this course. Why? It typically takes two years for a traditional paper publisher to turn a finished manuscript into a textbook ready for the first day of class. In this case, Mr. Nielsen was updating an older book, and the Preface indicates it was written in 1995. That's acceptable if the subject is Shakespeare. Not much has happened in Shakespeare studies in the past three years. But in January 1995 ...
Any textbook from back then has inadequate and false information through no fault of its own. Right? In the first sentence of the Preface, Nielson addresses this issue: "Why is this a book?" In my view, he covers hypertext at such a basic level that most of the information is still current. I certainly haven't found as concise and readable an account in one place on the Web. If you're wondering whether Nielson can practice what he preaches, I invite you to explore www.sun.com, which he designed, as well as www.useit.com, his professional site. You can also read an interview with him at Amazon.com where I got the image of the text's cover. In fact, we can have it both ways -- the book and the Web. Today, a Web browser with an open Internet connection is the door to the biggest library, by far the biggest library ever. Most of it didn't exist three years ago and it's growing so fast you'll never figure out how big it is. Indeed, the Web takes us so far beyond information glut that the trick is knowing when to turn the computer off and get some sleep. Course Web Without the Nielsen text, I would have to stitch together chunks from here and there on the Web. As a supplement to the Nielson text, however, this course web can bring you up to date, can practice what it preaches, and can point you in the right directions on the Web. In short, I will put a textbook amount of reading on our course web and provide links to a library's worth. I don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the objectives above, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources. Below you'll find links to design, news, commercial, style, and search resources. The tests and final exams will presume you know your way around these sites and documents as well as our course web. Design There are as many ways to design hypertexts as there are designers. One that makes sense to me is Ben Schneiderman's way in Designing information-abundant web sites: issues and recommendations. It has an interesting interactive demonstration, but your browser needs to support frames, so I will post a non-frame version without the demo to our school server. News Since hypertext is the foundation of the World Wide Web, you need to keep up. The best print resources are newspapers and magazines such as: Internet World (Web
Week until Feb 98) You'll find up-to-the-hour coverage of the digital world at Hot Wired. It offers news briefs and in-depth reporting on politics, business, culture, and technology. It also has a bleeding-edge style that continually amazes me. Similar but tamer publications include c|net and InfoWorld. Hypertext Doug Brent has a native hypertext called Rhetorics of the Web. A lousy title for a fascinating attempt. It not only has information you need, it has an attitude you might think about adopting. It is also a model for the web I'd like you to produce for this course. You can get it from Doug's site at the University of Calgary or from the Medaille server. The leading site for commercial hypertext is Eastgate Systems. You can get the whole list of pages on the site by typing host:www.eastgate.com into Altavista's keywords window. I would like you to read everything there. In addition, follow as many off-site links as possible. Style Wouldn't it be great to have a style manual at hand when you sit down to design a web? Well, search no more. As best I can tell, here's the most influential: Lynch, Patrick. Web Style Manual. New Haven: Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media, 1997. Search If you're not confident of your Web searching skills, Search Engine Watch has some terrific
tutorials, descriptions, and comparisons.
Evaluation
Special Requirements In order to prosper in the digital world, you must be able to do many things other than write sentences and paragraphs and work a keyboard and a mouse. Here are five activities that also apply to writing and to meeting the course objectives. Manage Digital Information To do well in this course, you will need a way to store and move digital files between computers, whether at school, work, or home. Also, back up your work frequently. I can't stress that enough so I'll just repeat it: make regular and frequent back-ups of all your work. You'll find a scanner in the library, in the New Media Studio, and at the H225 instructor's PC. If you don't own or can't borrow a digital camera, you can perhaps use one of the school's. In the classroom, you should make a nest for yourself on one of the computers. I will evaluate each of you by asking you to demonstrate your competency with each of these tools.
Please note potential compatibility problems: operating systems, file formats, software applications, and disk sizes. Think through the logistics in your personal situation and let me know if you foresee any problems.
Explore and Discover We use bits for things we already did well with atoms before we got on-line. For example, email can replace snailmail. We use networked bits -- hypertext -- for things we didn't do well before. Research is comprehensive, quick, and very cheap. Entertainment is interactive. I want you to focus on using hypertext to do things you
hadn't even thought of doing before you got on-line. The dreaming part is easy. The hard
part is making decisions. What do you want to do with
the hypertext?
Tolerate Ambiguity Listen to my students:
Whew! This course is not the kind where
there's one right answer to every question. In fact, for a lot of questions in hyperspace,
there are no right answers ... just like real life. You want to be able to both lead and
follow under such conditions. Think Big Transcend your and your organization's concrete situation
into an intelligent awareness of broader, often abstract, contexts. A good test is the
ease with which you can draw valid inferences from articles in the news. For example, do
you understand why the Justice Department is so upset with Microsoft for bundling the
Internet Explorer browser? Do you understand how the DOJ's pursuit of Microsoft affects
your ability to send email to your boss? Your big thinking helps me distinguish an A
project from an A- or B project. In real life, it helps the boss distinguish who gets
promoted. Assess Yourself
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