Why will be we using a web page for much of our work in junior seminar? Isn't there ENOUGH to do in this course without adding yet another task, and a task based in technology at that? I'm an ENGLISH MAJOR, you may well be thinking, and English majors are not supposed to be required to have anything to do with machines. We're all poets at heart, right? Give me printed books, with lovely pages I can riffle back and forth, pages I can write on directly and manually, pages that I can feel, NOT cold electronic "pages" that are untouchable, unwritable, scrolls not leaves.

One reason for using web pages and internet resources in this course might satisfy some of your parents: becoming technologically literate means that you will graduate from Reed as an English major with AT LEAST one highly saleable skill (if you as well as your parents are interested, ask me during office hours about others).

However, you, as a Reed student, want more than a commercially viable answer. You want THE TRUTH, or at least one discursive version of a possible construction of reality.

All right. Here are more reasons: First, some resources are available only on the internet, and some resources are available in a more timely way on the internet. Next, the internet allows us to use other ways of organizing information (a variety of the activity known as "thinking") from those paper, or brain cells, allow. Furthermore, using computer technology can help demystify power relations between professor and class, and between peers. Additionally, computer texts provide a different model of intertextuality from the one supplied by the familiar codex (or bound book). Finally, only by using the internet can one learn how to use it, and how to distinguish among its various uses as a source of information, disinformation, and communication; as techno-stimulation, entertainment , and a mode of access to other scholars.

Let me elaborate first on the contrasts between scroll and codex. I love books, too: printed books, manuscripts, typescripts, what have you. But as it happens, there's another ancient model of the written word more like that of the computer: the scroll. Inherent in this model of the written word is an image of a non-linear association of words. A scroll provides the advantage of serendipitous juxtapositions whose contexts can mutually illumine each other: a model of non-linear intertextuality. What happens when our notion of the text as codex is supplemented by the text as scroll, the text as a non-linear association of words and gaps?

Obviously related to the linear and non-linear orderings of text I associate with scroll and codex is an analogous set of images of thought. I need to read more about cognition to find out what I think here (perhaps Dan Reisberg's recent textbook would be a good place to begin).

Next, classroom dynamics and the mystification of power. [See Liu et al link] The Reed conference promotes an engaging equality between faculty and students, yet the "cultural capital" (Liu) the professor commands is both an essential and a distorting weight in the balance of power. By discovering and using the resources on the web, students can become both broadly and deeply knowledgeable about an area, can define a canon and a question they can explore with the professor and with other students. Furthermore, all assignments, discussion questions, papers and comments are centrally located and available to you and all members of the class; forgetfulness or slippery fingers will not prevent you from finishing the appropriate reading or checking what exactly your friend said in her essay on Ovid. Moreover, the writing software we are using may well enable you to provide and compare comments on drafts of your essays more easily than before. Resources available through the Doyle OWL can enable you to strengthen your writing skills, whether you want to develop your brainstorming, organizing, or editing strategies.

Finally, resources. On the web, you can discover, in one location, current bibliography (more available in a more timely way), web conferences on a topic of interest to you, experts to consult, discussion groups, and even primary materials not available anywhere else. You can quickly find biographical, historical, and critical information and references on a given writer. You can search for a particular word or phrase in its repeated appearances in a given text, creating, in effect, your own mini-concordance. If graphic materials (painting, sculpture, manuscript illuminations) are helpful to your study of the text, these can, in many cases, be viewed on-line.

I hope the web assignments for this course allow you to begin your work from whatever level of facility you already have with web tools. I welcome your comments on challenges and triumphs in your work with these assignments.

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Last revised August 1999.
ContactGail.Sherman@Reed.edu with questions or comments about the course.