Untitled - witz cultural

143RECONFIGURINGTHE AUTHORductory survey of English literature to explore the materials created for acourse in another discipline. Similarly, students from that course could nowencounter materials showing the effects on contemporary fiction of the concernscovered in their political science course. Hypertext thus allows and encouragescollaborative work, and at the same time it encourages interdisciplinaryapproaches by making materials created by specialists in differentdisciplines work together-collaborate.This kind of collaboration-by-link occurs all the time on the World WideWeb. Each time a student or faculty member from another institution hasone of their documents added to The Vicrorian Web-say, on characterizationor race, class, and gender inJane Eyre-they automatically join in a discussionon these topics. Similarly, Phil Gyford's translation of Pepys's Diaies into aWeblog, at which we looked in the previous chapter, exemplifies yet anotherapproach to collaboration on the Web.The important point here is that hypermedia linking automatically producescollaboration. Looking at the way the arms control materials joined tothose supporting the four English courses, one encounters a typical exampleof how the connectivity that characterizes hypertext transforms independentlyproduceddocuments into collaborative ones and authors working aloneinto collaborative authors. When one considers the arms control materialsfrom the point ofview oftheir originator, they exist as part ofa discrete bodyof materials. When one considers them from the vantage point of a reader,their status changes: as soon as they appear within a hypertext environment,these and all other documents then exist as part of a larger system and inrelation therefore to other materials on that system. By forming electronicpathways between blocks of texts, links actualize the potential relations betweenthem. fust as hypertext as an educational medium transforms theteacher from a leader into a kind of coach or companion, hypertext as a writingmedium metamorphoses the author into an editor or developer. Hypermedia,like cinema and video or opera, is a team production.