A Review of _Writing Space

Home | TOCs | The Visual | Remediation | Materiality | Works Cited

The Web as Writing Space
In Writing Space first edition, Bolter presented a compelling picture of the spatial elements of writing, in their concrete instances of text as pictograms, then phonetic alphabetic symbols, and finally as the metaphoric rendering of human thought (see chapters 3-5).   WS1 explored hypertext as it was then known – in self-contained computer programs and textual systems like StorySpace and Hypercard, and in the fictional prose works that had emerged to take advantage of new technological capabilities to manipulate text. In 1991, Bolter speculated frequently on the shape of writing to come both as the familiar forms and genres of texts – novels, essays, encyclopedias – and traditional material embodiments of texts – – the printed book, the library – intersected with digital modes. In Writing Space second edition, Bolter extends his discussion to how the Web has realized many of these projected transformations.
A Universal Encyclopedia
For example, one of the more interesting sections of WS1 was the exploration of the "Idea of the Book" (ch. 6) and the related historical tracing of the "encyclopedic impulse" and the complementary urge to create libraries. Encyclopedias emerged in the ancient world and later in the middle ages in response to both the abundance and scarcity of texts. For example, Pliny the Elder's Natural History appeared in the first century C.E. when a seemingly large amount of written textual information from the classical and Hellenistic eras threatened to become unmanageable and thus unable to create meaning. On the other hand, Isidore of Seville's Etymologies (seventh century C.E.) was written in a time of scarcity of good texts of any kind. Later encyclopedias, including the French Encyclopedie of the eighteenth century and subsequent modern productions of which the Britannica is the best example, have had to deal with the hugely expanded amount of text generated by industrialized print culture; they have attempted to organize textual knowledge in a way that meets demands for practicality in the useful, alphabetically presented essays while attempting to keep in contact with the encyclopedic impulse to present knowledge in some kind of coherent whole, a whole that reflects the conceptual order of the culture.
          As he concludes the discussion in WS1, Bolter writes that one way the "encyclopedic impulse" was being guided by electronic capabilities was in rendering the fixed-print versions as stand alone hypertexts. In WS2, Bolter explores how that impulse has been made manifest in "the organization of cyberspace itself" (89). "Portal sites" such as Yahoo! and AltaVista serve a function similar to the organizing "essay" that preceded older encyclopedias (or the Propaedia of the fifteenth edition of the Britannica), and the associated search engines provide the indexes by which texts are retrieved. Although the number of texts in the "encyclopedia" is huge, the power of automated searching compensates to provide potentially relevant readings very quickly. So what if the Web is a chaos of images and texts, and the organizational categories of the portals are eclectic? A provocative implication here is that our cultural "encyclopedic impulse" is responding to contemporary concepts of reality, the (by definition) unstable Web instantiating a dynamic vision of personal and intellectual life. Our use of information and ideas of knowledge is "opportunistic" in Bolter's words; we expect structures of information and knowledge to be temporary and contingent.
          This was not the case for an encyclopedia in manuscript or in print, where the technology encouraged more or less permanent structures of knowledge. What we have today is a view of knowledge as collections of (verbal and visual) ideas that can arrange themselves into a kaleidoscope of hierarchical and associative patterns – each pattern meeting the needs of one class of readers on one occasion (90-91). This representation of the Web as cultural encyclopedia deserves continued investigation and discussion.
A Global Library
As encyclopedia compilers attempt to control and subsume texts by digesting them, the librarian impulse is to collect texts and control them through organization, often hierarchical. As Bolter writes, the "library is the physical realization of a culture's writing space of books" (WS2 91). Whereas in WS1 Bolter speculated generally about universal text databases (101-02), in WS2 he focuses on how the Web is realizing in many ways the quest for a universal library.
          Important as theoretical and practical touchstones even back in 1991, Ted Nelson's proposed Xanadu system and the Perseus Project at Tufts continue as models of large and smaller scale hypertexts available over a global computer network. Nelson's plan for a "universal data structure" was really more comprehensive than the Web-networked texts available today; he envisions any text in the system being accessible from any other text, with "writers and readers throughout the world working in the same conceptual space" (WS2 94). Bolter sees this as unrealistic for the Web as we know it. But the model represented by the Perseus project, which concentrates on ancient and historical texts and sources and bills itself "an evolving digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and language" (Perseus), makes more sense as a viable use of the Web to remediate the traditional smaller research library. The interests of historians and classicists are focused enough, and texts few enough relatively speaking, to allow the current Web to host a useful and maintainable collection. But, Bolter suggests, however the Web grows, and whatever media it hosts and prefers, it will be conceived of and used as a universal library (WS2 96). The experience of many of us with students who use the Web as their primary resource seems to support this contention.
          One concept left unexplored in WS2, however, is the "scalability" of on-line libraries from the individual and personal to the global and public. In a very evocative passage in WS1, Bolter writes
The universal electronic database may be individual or collective. The individual writer dreams of recording all his or her essays, notes, and jottings on one systematic form, while scholars and scientists imagine vast collective repositories of information available immediately to any user in the nation or the world. For some, these two visions coalesce: each writer's database is absorbed into the universal network, until all writers occupy a single vast space…" (102)
Such a microcosmic view of the library, it seems to me, has been and is being put into action in the electronic portfolio movement for teaching, learning, and assessment. Writers who assemble portfolios for network presentation (whether as Web pages or slide-shows housed on Web servers) indeed collect texts produced by themselves and others, selecting, organizing, and "controlling" them, and frequently link those texts outward to pages on the global network. The small personal library becomes intermingled, then, with the universe of available texts, each compiler selecting those external texts according to her own purpose in that project. Along with the universal library of the whole Web and the smaller scale collections such as Project Perseus, these micro-collections instantiated in portfolios represent an important aspect of how the Web is developing as a hypertextual, non-hierarchical "library" structure.
          Further, considering the electronic portfolio and its remediation of older textual forms and purposes in cyberspace leads to an interesting link back to the "encyclopedic impulse" discussed previously. As digital portfolios interweave the personal with the public, one of the means of making sense of this potentially unified constellation of text is the reflective essay that explains how the collected texts are meaningful in the personal context of the portfolio. In these synthetic pieces, writers can explain their situation and resources, reflecting on the individual texts they have chosen and the significances of these texts in their larger purpose.   In many ways, these reflective pieces offer a personal "summa" or medieval-style "encyclopedia" that lays out the importance of their collected texts in the context of the personal "culture" of their microcosmic collection or library. Just as medieval encyclopedias were organized topically to reflect an ordered, hierarchical, and comprehensible universe, an electronic portfolio reflects the compiler's progress of literacy, which flows from experience and a sense of what is real into the particular project at hand. The reflective center of the portfolio seeks, ideally, to capture this rationale on a personal level, similar to the ways ancient and medieval writers explained and justified their work on a larger cultural and religious stage.
          So, in a very interesting way, the environment of cyberspace has extended the possibilities for personal writing spaces to extend into and intermingle with the public – the borderline between, so absolute in the age of print, is vanishing. The literate impulses that drive writers/readers to collect, integrate, summarize, and link outward seem again to be remediations of earlier textual forms and purposes – in this case the creation of encyclopedias and libraries.
          WS2 goes in an alternate direction when considering "Digital Libraries" in chapter 5 (93) when Bolter examines various Web-based projects that bring collections of texts to particular audiences, and the relationship of those within the great physical libraries of the world. Discussion and research on the micro-level implications of electronic portfolios for larger collections of texts are warranted, however, and should be stimulated by Bolter's new edition.