Untitled - witz cultural

303RECONFIGURINGLITERARYEDUCATIONcomputers: the personal computer brought with it both greater convenienceand resultant wider usage but also a marked loss in certain forms of computerliteracy based on networked computing. Many more people used computers,though often inefficiently as little more than typewriters, but comparativelyfew took advantage ofelectronic mail, bulletin boards, and discussion groups.Without access to the kind of networked textuality provided by Intermedia, studentsfound ry'nchronous collaboration more difficult to carry out. Forhrnately,when moving from Intermedia to Storyspace a great deal was also gained.The sophistication and intellechral accomplishments exemplified by thesefirst student webs compensated in many ways for the loss of an immenselypowerful, if occasionally unstable, networked environment. The very firstwebs demonstrated more clearly than could any theoretical argument thatwriting in this medium creates new genres and new expectations. As onelooks at these projects, it is clear that new kinds of academic writing were takingform. A few of them, like David Stevenson's Freud Web,whose dozen anda half lexias offer an introduction to Freud's theories, represent attempts tocreate hypertext versions ofthe standard academic term paper. Intrigued bythe possibilities ofhypertext, which he had encountered in English 32, Stevensonasked permission to create his term paper in Intermedia, and not surprisinglyhe followed the approaches used in developing the lexias he hadseen in Context32; that is, like the developers of the course materials, hewrote each ofhis substantial discussions offree association. libido, and thelike, and to these he added a bibliography, chronology, bibliography, and variousgraphic presentations of Freud's model of the mind.The Freud Web,Tike a number of others, moved first to Storyspace andthen Stevenson himself created an HTML version, making it one of the veryfirst set of humanities materials available anywhere on the World Wide Web(it resided on a server belonging to the High Energy Theory Group in Brown'sphysics department). In its earliest version Stevenson interlinked it to the textof Rudyard Kipling's "Mary Postgate," a narrative of psychosexual violencethat he believed Freud's theories would illuminate. Looking in retrospect atthis pioneering student web, one sees how it combines two different kindsof writing. The Freud Web itself contains only materials written by a singleauthor, but he then pushed the resulting web up against a literary text, therebycreating a hybrid form of writing in which the intellectual connections andinterpretations consist only in links.In contrast to Stevenson's approach of linking.ftom outside, Steve Boyan'sadaptation of Edgar Lee Masterk Spoon River Anthology,likethe In Memonq.mWeb,uses paths or trails of links through an existing text to permit reading