Notes

1. As Davida Charney notes in “The Effect of Hypertext on Processes of Reading and Writing,” “Thus far, the most common application of hypertext has been for computer manuals, encyclopedias, or guide books, providing readers with immediate access to definitions of key terms, cross-references, graphic illustrations, or commentary from previous readers” (239). Since such texts have already proved most suitable to hypertextual formatting, it seems likely
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   that they will also be among the first to made available for pocket sized computer books which are still in the experimental stage.
2. Most of the studies Charney reviews feature such expository hypertexts (252–255).
3. Charney’s research concern in “The Effect of Hypertext on Processes of Reading and Writing” is captured in one of her subtitles: “Can Hyertext Designers Create Appropriate Paths for Readers?” The research she cites hinges upon this possibility and the effort is to discover which cognitive structures are “appropriate” to specific materials and identifiable audiences. The reading experience with which I am concerned in this essay is one in which readers use the cognitive frame-works. or schema which they bring to the reading experience in place of the ones provided for them. In such reading experiences, readers assimilate bits of information into the schema which pertains to their own worldviews. Examples of such reading would be: reading word processing files with the aid of searching, indexing, outlining, bookmarking, and linking tools; reading a database through boolean search techniques; browsing randomly through a hypermedia text; reading electronic mail or notes; reading while randomly surfing the World Wide Web. In each of these instances, the reader’s motives provide the “structure” of the reading acts rather than the writer’s or designer’s motive.
4. The text I have quoted is gleaned from Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s website featuring Nostalgic Angels http://tempest.english.purdue.edu/NA/na.html [site is no longer active.]. It seems “appropriate” to mention that I was not able to obtain a printed copy of ‘ Nostalgic Angels from Von’s, the beloved Purdue bookstore, and had to have recourse to Johndan’s website.
5. The argument of this essay (that constructive hyper-reading can be described in the terms listed) should be understood as a configuration, that is, as a phenominological description of my experience, generalized in a manner that invites concurrence. In effect, I am asking the readers of this essay if my description of hyper-reading matches their experience. If it does, then our concurrence becomes a basis for the articulation of a problematics of hyper-reading. See “Configuring” in Token Professionals and Master Critics and “Explaining, Justifying, and Configuring” in Modern Skeletons in Postmodern Closets.
6. In “The Shape of Text on Screen” (CCC 44,151), Stephen Bernhardt suggests ten features of texts constructed to be read online: situationally embedded, interactive, functionally mapped, modular, navigable, hierarchically embedded, spacious, graphically rich, customizable, and publishable. These features correspond roughly to the aspects of hyper-reading I delineate. Although Bernhardt focuses on the online text rather than the reader, it is useful to note that his delineation of hypertextual features parallels my experience of hyper-reading, especially since I did not employ his categories as the basis of my descriptors.
7. http://tempest.english.purdue.edu/NA/na.html [site is no longer active.]
8. In the research that Charney reviews, for example, the questions posed are variants of: “Can readers make appropriate selections of what and how much to read? Can readers create appropriate sequences of textual material? If readers are unable to navigate a hypertext effectively, can hypertext designer-writers reasonably anticipate readers’ various needs and create appropriate paths to satisfy them?” (250). At the same time, she acknowledges the limitations of these queries when she writes: “I am skeptical that a hypertext designer, even under ideal conditions, can anticipate all the paths that readers may wish to create within and between texts. As we have seen, a wide range of factors influence the appropriateness of a sequence for a given reader, including the reader’s prior knowledge of the domain, the reader’s task or purpose for reading, the reader’s learning style, and the nature of the information itself. Because of the huge number of possible combinations of such factors, the array of alternative paths that a designer might create becomes a practical impossibility and there still remains the problem of directing the right readers to the right paths.” (258) Notice the assumption that there are “right” paths. This assumption privileges the writer’s motives in creating the text over the reader’s motives for reading it because it is the writers or designers who finally decide what readers need to obtain the meaning offered by them. Though these assumptions are efficacious in studying reading for information, they do not correspond well to the sort of reading Sirc describes, in which the material is chosen because it is easily available and suits the motive of the reader which may be simply to be entertained. Charney tends to see designers of hypertexts that allow for the free play of the readerly imagination as “romantic.” Yet, “serious” readers
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   may dismantle texts organized to obtain specific arrays of information (which are therefore arranged in semantic hierarchies) for motives that belong only to them (which do not correspond to the hierarchies inscribed in the text). In a print environment, for example, a Foucault scholar may wish to read the text’s “margins.’’ In either environment, a scholar may be interested in articulations of a particular concept removed from its contexts. In this case, the reader could use the entire corpus of a particular writer AS IF it were a dictionary, that is, a source of definitions. In such cases, texts become information in the radical sense—discrete bits of meaning unrelated to each other—which readers RE-write, that is, re-assemble into schema of their own. This type of reading—searching for the articulation of a particular concept—is facilitated by reading machines such as search engines and disregards the textual structures provided by the writer or designer.
9. Charney writes “Many cognitive theories assume that much of the knowledge in long-term memory is organized around such hierarchical frameworks (referred to in various theories as schemes, frames, or scripts) that capture familiar patterns among elements. There may be schemes for events, for genres of text, for characteristics of a species, for the elements in a system.” Though some psychologists, she notes, “reject the schema as a cognitive mechanism, that is, as a way to formalize or model the way in which encountering a familiar proposition reliably evokes a pattern of related propositions. Neither Kintsch nor other psychologists, however, will dispute the consistently observed behaviors that schemes are meant to capture. Regardless of what cognitive mechanism is ultimately selected as the best formalism for the phenomenon, the concept of a script or schema remains a useful one” (246).
10. Charney notes that many researches find that “it is easier to read comprehend, and remember a text if it contains an informative title headings, overviews, and topic sentences introducing key concepts that are repeated and developed in successive portions of text” (245).
11. Johndan Johnson-Eilola reminds us in Nostalgic Angels that books are machines for transmitting authority and that technology often performs the same social function. In my example, authority can be transmitted more systematically and thoroughly and the technology in this case may simply automate authorization in ways that are hardly liberating.
12. Issues of text embedding, navigability, hierarchy discussed by hypertext theories like Stephen Bernhardt’s (“The Shape of Text on Screen”) assume that hyper-readers skim electronic texts.
13. My view on this matter clashes somewhat with Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s, who cites Eagleton, Baudrillard, and Moulthrop to the effect that “In this apparent subversion of print, the fluid, open nature of hypertext (the attributes that seem the most in opposition to print text) may actually be even more conservative than other media, which cannot as easily subsume critique and resistance. By partly naming its inadequacies, an ideology may be able to “tighten rather than loosen its grip” with a self-deprecating honesty that appears to acknowledge its own flaws by showing a “limited degree of ironic self-awareness” that can mask and/or subvert important struggles.” I suspect that in the question of academic authorization, the Web diminishes authorial authority. On the Web it is often impossible to tell whose “work” is on the page you are reading. At least at this moment, academic work on the Web is not entirely governed by institutional practices. At the Crossroads Conference in the summer of 1996, there was considerable discussion about the scholarly merits of any given web resource, making it clear that the sort of authorization that exists for publications in print environments does not translate easily to electronic ones. Until copyright issues are settled, if that is ever to be possible, the author’s authority will probably not be entirely creditable.
14. This view has been challenged. See Charney, 240ff. However, there seems to be abundant evidence that hypertexts are growing in popularity and scope—e.g., the increase in websites that are not designed by professionals. This certainly suggests some correlation between reader’s cognitive makeup and a less “linear” linkage between textual components, which is not to say that structured (“expository”) hypertexts do NOT suit our cognitive makeup. The question this debate raises for me is whether, since logical formalities do not match the cognitive sequences that generate them, any essayistic formalities correspond (in a phenomenological sense) to cognitive activity.