| "At this early stage the small teams of printers had to know how to do everything: cut type, cast letters, compose a text, work the press" |
| Henri-Jean Martin |
| The History and Power of Writing, 233. |
Martin's description of the nature of the early printing trade spreading out from Mainz around 1500 bears a remarkable resemblance, on a general level, to working on the Web today. One needs to know how to do a little of everything at this point, much of it having little to do with what really wants to be concentrating one's energy on, in my case writing. Some of this will be alleviated by the next generation of tools, some of it by collaboration. For now, though, constructing a text on the Web requires a number of tasks and skills that eat away at the part of my writing space that is perhaps the hardest to come by--time.
On the most basic level, the complete reconfiguring of my physical writing space has undoubtedly restructured how I use my writing time. Driving and parking did not used to be major components of my writing time: now they are. Getting back and forth to various places around campus is a drain on time and energy, as is getting to a particular computer cluster only to find every station already occupied.
Much of my struggle in writing this project has been not with the prose but with the linking structure of it. This is not necessarily a bad thing: thinking about how the nodes and topics will relate to each other and how the reader will encounter them is obviously a vital part of writing in hypertext. My point is not that thinking about this structure is not writing--it is--but simply that it is obviously very different than writing a text that is to be read in a single sequence. It is a new skill, one that I am still learning, and the learning curve takes time. In writing a printed text, no matter how many possibilities of order one considers while writing, the drive is always to, in the end, select one sequence as best. This is not true in a hypertext. The problem becomes not only the sequence in which readers will approach it, but also consideration of what they've read before the current node and how much (if any) textual overlap there needs to be between nodes in order for the current one to seem coherent. In trying to answer the demands of the new medium and more traditional academic demands at the same time, I'm sure that I've spent a great deal more time thinking about what goes where, whether to overlap text on related themes by putting it in two separate nodes or establishing links between nodes, whether to quote online sources by cutting and pasting an excerpt of the text into mine or by pointing to it, than I have in actually forming ideas into words.
While the task of organization is inarguably part of writing, my time has also been taken up with a number of technical tasks that are more debatable, or at least less welcome. Even with text editors designed for it, tagging HTML can be a laborious task. Some of it was interesting because I was learning new things, but most of it is fairly routine busywork, more intellectually taxing than typing but not exactly what one would call deep thought. If it can be tedious even with specially designed editors, doing it by hand with other editors or word processors can be a time-waster of the first order. But if I wanted to work at home, this was how I had to do it. Thus, the changes to my physical writing space dictated by the desire to work in hypertext had a profound effect on my time for writing, and made me a sort of itinerant writer, a computer junkie wandering around campus looking for a fix.
My personal economic constraints aside, the tedium of tagging HTML should be solved by the next generation of HTML editors, which should be, like most word-processing programs, true WYSIWYG editors. If one reads the appropriate Usenet groups for awhile, it becomes apparent that there are a number of HTML "purists" out there whom this bothers--i.e., that new users of the Web, since they won't have much need to look directly at the code but just at its translation by a Web browser, will not know HTML. The truth is that people who are not interested in HTML tagging as a skill in its own right have little need or interest in seeing the tags regularly, any more than users of Word Perfect need to spend time adding control characters such as tabs, returns, and font designators to their documents by hand.
Here is a short list of the various tasks necessary to working on this project. A similar list of tools used is also available.
None of the problems in this list is insurmountable. But what happens is that the time I set aside for my writing gets redefined. As my energy gets dispersed and somewhat diluted into what I once would have perceived as peripheral or even unrelated activities, what I'm doing when I'm "writing" has metamorphosed into a new kind of activity. I spend time paying attention to the tools themselves in ways I did not when I first switched from the typewriter to the word processor. The word processor did not enable a new kind of publication or a new art form, but just an easier way of preparing a text for traditional publishing methods. These tools demand a different level of attention, and not just because there is a wider variety of them. They enable a new art form, so time spent with them is often spent thinking about the tool itself and the particulars of what it might enable. And at that point, the redefinition of the temporal writing space begins to redefine the cognitive one.
Abstract | Future Directions | Bibliography | Glossary | "Holier Than Thou" | Project Entrance
Initial release: June 10, 1996
Last update: August 4, 1996