I’ve spent the last two weeks exploring how using web 2.0 technologies (wikis) for writing, affects our understanding of ways in which academic writing can change. Pbworks is the tool that we used to enrich a wiki document entitled: “History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward” by David Silver. I also created my own experimentation playground, and very creatively gave it the title: “Ellis’s Play Ground”!

One of the questions that arose while we edited and enhanced David Silver’s blog was whether we could go beyond adding links, references, pictures,  etc., and change what the original author wrote.

I came, I read, I re-wrote:

When an author publishes an article on a collaborative site, doesn’t that imply that the author expects people to add to and alter the content? Also we must remember that the author didn’t actually place his article on the wiki. It was originally a blog that was transferred by us onto the wiki, and therefore Mr David Silver has no real say in how the article progresses from this point forward.

I can see two points to consider here, first the legality and morality of taking someone else’s work and modifying it to suit ones needs, and who decides at what point the text becomes modified substantially enough that it no longer belongs to the original author? The second point is that it certainly seems to be more interesting and useful for any reader to be able to take a piece of text, and decide its meaning for him or herself. In “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes (1977), he argues:

"To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text."

“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”

Also interesting as was pointed out during board discussions is Reader Response Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism

“Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance.”

“each reader creates his or her own…”: What if a number of people are collaborating on a piece of text?, with each having differing opinions regarding its meaning? How can we fit a number of different interpretations into a single piece of text?  Is it not best to leave collaborative works to articles of science and fact, and leave pieces of opinion and art to individuals so that personal expression can come out? Or is there a way for the ideas of individuals to shine through a compromise created by committee?  

The good old days:

Editing hypertext documents reminded me of those adventure books (Choose your own adventure) I read as a teenager. At the end of each page the reader is given a number of options on how the story can progress, and based on the choice is instructed to go to a particular page in order to continue the story. The entire adventure including all options for progression is contained within the pages of one book, and I can imagine those “choices” as a very early form of hyperlinking long before the internet started to make its mark in business and education.

Using wiki’s, and hyperlinking, stories can also be created intentionally this way. Or even non-intentionally where any online article together with the documents that it links to can be considered to be one story (as long as the hypertexts link to content that is relevant to the general narrative of the original text).

But current technology also gives us the ability to introduce ideas, and empower the reader and the writer in ways which weren’t possible in the “good old days”. Some interesting ideas and examples of what can be done include Editing Stretchfilm by Anders Fagerjord which offers an insight into Landow’s view of how hypertext can be used, enabling readers to select from the content of an article depending on their own needs.

The Mystery web essay is an example of the adventure stories mentioned earlier where the reader can go in different directions depending on chosen hyperlinks. Also going back to the question of author ownership, and reader-response theory, while exploring this essay we notice that the author follows different ideas depending on the paths chosen. Some paths are circular leading back to previous pages. The content is non-deterministic, vague, with statements, media and images that can be interpreted in different ways.

I enjoy mystery, and found this essay fun and interesting to explore. Perhaps the author’s intention is for different endless perspectives to coexist, stretching the imagination of the reader to offer his or her own interpretations of the content.   

But going back to “History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward” I found it difficult to modify the text itself. It didn’t seem right to do so, and my thinking was that if I have my own ideas and perspectives then I should offer them in a different wiki or blog. I’m sure some would disagree with that, and feel it is ok to modify the content of someone else’s work even if it is opinion, but regardless, web 2.0 offers so many more ways to enrich and enhance works such as these by adding images, hyperlinks, video’s, comments, etc.

Sometimes just a picture, and a few colours, can make an article more appealing to read than one long slab of text.

References:

Roland Barthes,(1977) The Death of the Author: 

http://www.deathoftheauthor.com/

David Silver, (2008): History, Hope, and Afterward:

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2143/1950

Landow, G (2006) Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in a Global Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) extracts: 278-291 and 302-309.