Since the sections of the dissertation are posted in the customary chronological order onto the blog, and always with the most recently published post at the top of the text-queue, readers there confront the succession of these sections and the case they develop in an order that reverses (at least) that for a reader of the dissertation as a printed text.
Even quite regular readers of the blog might visit and find themselves immersed in what would seem an altogether arbitrary place more or less in the middle of things from the perspective of a more straightforward inhabitation and linear reading of the text. Once there, the text that “follows” as the reader scrolls onward down the screen –- assuming her attention is sufficiently compelled by what she is reading to do so in the first place -– will likely be text that had preceded the same section for readers of the printed document.
However, since the sections of the dissertation have been posted onto the blog over a period of weeks, they are interspersed with posts unrelated to the dissertation in any case. These sections jostle next to occasional posts containing commentary about current events, random quotations, and the like, not to mention posts related to the dissertation but unavailable to readers of the printed version, such as reports on the entertaining vicissitudes of my fraying state of mind while writing the dissertation itself, or extended meditations on topics originating there but which seemed perhaps too digressive or provisional or polemical for inclusion there, or what have you.
Each section of the dissertation posted to the blog provides a link to a table of contents for the dissertation as a whole which places the section in its context within the printed volume, and establishes a way to navigate the digital text that better approximates my intentions, to the extent that these are registered in the choices that have made their way to the printed version of the text in the first place. Although I have thus taken some measures to indicate and facilitate an online reader’s course along my own preferred track through the dissertation, I am well aware that this track represents an already romantic idealization of a more dedicated and straightforward reading than the presumed “stability” of print could compel in any case. And certainly the derangements of the online text, the overabundant proliferation of unpredictable pathways both into and away from the digital text exacerbate these difficulties beyond any easy reckoning.
Of course, it is already true that every text relies for its intelligibility and force on its relations to a discursive universe outside of itself. But digitexts can render such relations conspicuous precisely as part of the way in which they would essay to convey and produce meaning, actively soliciting a reader’s attention to the text as never only a registration of authorial intentions, say, but as points of entry and exit to other texts.
In digitexts marks, words, phrases, images, and other textual materials can function simultaneously as conveyances of meaning within the text and as clickable hyperlinks that become portals into different texts altogether. Digitext systems that display documents in ways that accommodate this function are called “hypertexts.”
And in digitexts marks, words, phrases, images, and other textual materials are likewise susceptible to notice by search engines as well as the tagging, bookmarking, and annotation practices of online readers in ways that make them points of entry into the text itself, often against the grain of authorial intentions or expectations. I will call digitexts whose availability on the web renders them susceptible to such proliferating points of entry “tagtexts.”
To the extent that, whatever my intentions in the matter, at least some of the readers of at least some of the content of my dissertation will have been drawn into the text online by tapping some string of terms I can scarcely fathom the significance of into a search engine that directs them to one or more of its sections, then this digitext dissertation is at once blogtext, hypertext, and tagtext.
In his classic discussion, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, George P. Landow takes as his point of departure for the discussion of digital hypertexts Michel Foucault’s figuration in his Archeology of Knowledge of books “as… node[s] within a network” for which the “frontiers… are never clear cut,” as well as Roland Barthes’ description in S/Z of every text as a “galaxy of signifiers.”
Well over a decade after the publication of Landow’s book, a researcher at University College in London, Frode Hegland, in collaboration with Doug Engelbart (the inventor of the computer mouse and a pioneer of hyptertext systems), recently created an editing program for digitexts called “Liquid Information.” This system enables readers to transform any word in an online document into what Hegland calls a “hyperword,” which is a hyperlink tag that could point to multiple locations at once. A hyperword could, but certainly need not, co-incide with an author’s own hyperlinks. And the destinations to which a hyperword might lead would be, as Hegland envisions them, extraordinarily provocative and profuse.
“Liquid Information” describes an exemplary tagtext. It might provide a way to read an author’s retrospective commentary about aspects of her own work after the passage of time along with the reading of the online work itself, or it might provide a way to follow instead the annotations of particular trusted or influential or provocative alternate readers of any digitext. Hyperwords might link to standard definitions of terms occurring in a digitext, or to substantiating or refuting evidence provided by subsequent researchers. Or these hyperwords could provide portals onto significant discussions of a piece abroad in culture, the contours of which might be determined by citational indexes or automatic aggregators of attention or information. Indeed, “Liquid Information,” or at any rate whatever comparable tagtext systems might eventually emerge, could render all of these relationships between online digitexts conspicuous all at once.
It is intriguing that Hegland quite explicitly assumes both an ideological and a developmental kinship between the capacities of tagtext and the hypertext systems introduced in the last generation of digital media. Hegland indicates significantly that he has been “working on these ideas since 1991” (a year before Landow published his book on hypertext, for instance), while Engelbart simply pronounces the “Liquid Information” project as “the next stage of the web.”
George Landow proposes that hypertext itself stands in a suggestive relationship to “[s]cholarly articles,” which long preceded them and which likewise, “situate themselves within a field of relations” in an explicit way. But even while he registers the kinship of the hyperlink to practices of scholarly citation, he is quick to insist that the different technological conditions that have presided over the expression of this generic connection render their difference a qualitative rather than quantitative one.
Even the citational references a scholarly text registers explicitly (to say nothing of its implicit, unconscious, or otherwise diasavowed textual relations) are “[kept] out of sight” he argues, “by the print medium” itself “and [are] relatively difficult to follow, because in print technology the referenced (or linked) materials lie spatially distant from the references to them.” He goes on to distinguish these from “[e]lectronic hypertext,” which, “in contrast, makes individual references easy to follow and the entire field of interconnections obvious and easy to navigate.”
The hyperlinks available to readers of this dissertation on my blog are located in roughly the same places where readers of the print publication encounter citations, but they function quite differently for me for all their similarities.
For one thing, while I provide a particular page reference within most texts for which I provide a citation, my hyperlinks will typically lead readers instead to a text that they could explore as a whole, or sometimes to a bookstore that provides an opportunity to purchase the text for the same reason (often online bookstores will provide quite a lot of supplementary discussion of the text as well as a kind of promotion, sometimes by a number of rather different sorts of readers), or perhaps to the author’s website. In part, this reflects for me a host of primarily cultural differences in my sense of my ethos as a “blogger” as against my sense of the demands appropriate to scholarly authorship, especially in the uniquely credentializing scene of the writing of a dissertation in particular.
Citations provide a record – even if it is sometimes an idealized one – of the survey of relevant literature and evidence that substantiates the claims and buttresses the judgments made over the course of a scholarly publication. And in this, they function at once to consolidate a performance of scholarly authorship as an authoritative one, while likewise stabilizing the text in its assumption of a distinctive position it presumably expresses and defends against contestation.
While hyperlinks certainly can provide an analogous function, they have always seemed to me occasions to register rather more conversational sorts of relations, and to provide opportunities for exploration that are just as likely to be tangential to the textual moment that occasions them as they are to provide substantiations of a particular position.
In this connection, it seems relevant to mention as well that the printed version of the dissertation lacks of course the “comment” function in which each section of the blogposted digitext culminates, a clickable button that affords the reader of the online version a ready opportunity to respond to the text and register impressions however and whenever they like. Since every comment to the blog is likewise posted to me instantly as an e-mail, comments there arrive at my notice in a way that is better assured a quick response, and is more likely therefore to inaugurate something like a real-time conversation, either in the intimate quasi-privacy of a subsequent e-mail exchange or in the more public exchange of comments in the comment-section associated with the post, a conversation in which who knows how many others might make their own contributions.
As it happens, I think that it is possible to exaggerate both the extent and significance of differences such as these, even while I would grant they are more than adequate to justify Landow’s attribution of a qualitative rather than simply quantitative distinction between scholarly citation practices in print publication and practices of hypertext publication.
What most interests me for the purposes of the dissertation in all this are the ways in which the condition of “publicity” unique to digitexts published online as hypertexts or transformed by social software practices into online tagtexts will demand a relinquishment by their authors of different measures of control over the terms of their reception and of the terms in which they generate meanings in the public worlds into which they have been released.
To the extent that “publication” has managed to become simultaneously a quintessential expression of the superlatively individual “genius” of the romantic authorial self, as well as a quintessential evocation of an idealized public sphere of letters, “publication” is inevitably a privileged figure through which we negotiate the terms of private and public life. And observing the ways in which emerging technologies would transform, or at any rate promise or threaten to transform, the terms of publication and so the public performance of private selves it facilitates, exerts, to say the least, an endless fascination. It is also the primary provocation for this essay.
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