Date: Wed, 5 Mar 1997 09:45
From: RANDY
Subject: Reflections: Let's Look for Two Kinds of Sites
Randy Bass writes:
A distinction or clarification occurred to me last night driving home, regarding what it is I'm hoping we'll locate in Web sites over the next couple weeks.
I think we should be trying to find two kinds of sites, both relevant to the question of textuality, knowledge, and pedagogy.
(1) One kind we might call "limit sites": these are sites which deliberately utilize electronic capabilities to play with the formal dimensions of "texts" in order to construct meaning. I think of them as "limit sites" or "limit texts" (that's Barthes' phrase, but when he uses it it also has a psychosocial meaning) because they are deliberately stretching, transgressing, hybridizing the formal qualities of knowledge genres, and utilizing electronic environments to re-create an expressive mode. These kinds of electronic texts are ones that push the "limits" or "horizons" of what is possible, rather than merely replicating "grids" "hierarchies," and "sequences" in electronic form.
These kinds of e-texts are often self-conscious, self-reflexive, and metatextual at some level. I would call "Afternoon" this kind of text; I would put the hypertexts you created in this genre. I think of the "Remembering Nagasaki" site that I showed you early on, this kind of site. And there are many more. I think that "limit sites" or "limit texts" tend to try to incorporate "play" and many of the components that we discussed that go with that, as well as (in the context of knowledge-texts) drawing on the dimensions of disciplinary knowledge that relate to self-consciousness about that field of knowledge. Thus, an historical site that played with the dynamics of electronic form would probably be (at least partially) informed by a self-conscious sense of historiography.
(2) The second kind of site we might call a "transformation site" (I am not happy with that phrase, but I can't do better this morning). These sites are the kinds that I proposed for the electronic fieldwork links off the syllabus (www.georgetown.edu/bassr/511/fieldlinks.html). "Transformation sites" are sites which take a body of texts/artifacts/content and through the use of electronic capabilities transform the knowledge, or knowledge constructing capacity, of that content. In these kinds of sites, I'd like us to look carefully at the particular functions of the electronic environment that contribute to that transformation. How are Whitman's poems transformed in electronic form? How is the history of the Shenandoah Valley transformed in electronic form? Which electronic functions make which kinds of knowledge-making possible? Which electronic functions reveal which kinds of assumptions about the disciplinary structure of the knowledge to begin with?
So, as you look for sites, or look at the ones I proposed, I would like us to have an open conversation through the listserv, and then in class, about the components of these two kinds of sites: the ones that openly play with form; the ones that reconstruct content through electronic tools (or combinations of both), and to ask, where knowledge making is affected by particular electronic functions, or rhetorics.
Note on "Cultural Knowledge":
I am using the idea of "cultural knowledge" fairly narrowly in my examples--they tend to be academic, and content driven. I don't want that to inhibit you, in terms of what interests you. My primary interest, as I said the first day of class, is in textuality, expressive genres, the representation of cultural history; however, you all should feel free to expand the idea of cultural knowledge to suit your interests, provided that the focus remains on these two fundamental foci: play with form that generates meaning, and reconstruction of content that transforms the kind of knowledge that can be made of it.
A Note on Pedagogy:
As I hope we can address specifically over the next few weeks, I think that this kind of thinking and analysis is critical to a deeper appreciation of the pedagogical possibilities for electronic texts. In culture and history classrooms, there always exists a triangular relationship between:
-learner -teacher -material
This triangulation can be mediated in a variety of ways; but for the most part, all classroom dynamics are constructed around the idea that the teacher is somehow mediating the learner's relationship with the material. For example in a literature class, I am usually doing one of two things: I'm either asking questions that lead students to look at their texts in a new way; or I'm performing some practice of "reading" for them that models some relationship that they should have with the text. The most fundamental and pressing challenge of teaching culture and history with technology is trying to understand how this triangulation is affected and (hopefully) enhanced. But to fully grasp that, or even glimpse it, I think it is critical to ask how it is that content/text itself is transformed in electronic media, in order to figure out how to reshape the teacher's role in mediating the relationship between learner and material.
I hope this begins to clarify this. When we come back on Tuesday after break, we'll look at some sites, as well some different models for mixing games, simulations, narrative, archive, and textual databases.
Have a good break. Look forward to some site discovery and conversation.