Power and Pedagogy: Transforming Education through Information Technology

Appendix - Device Indepenedent Referencing

Interactivity is the ballyhoo of hypertext. Its theorists decry the linearity of the printed book. They do so thoughtlessly, and thereby miss both the problem and the opportunity. Books are highly interactive tools. Moreover, as interactive tools they are even very efficient. Despite this interactiveness characteristic of books, many printed texts are "linear," meaning they have a beginning, middle, and end. This sequentiality, which writers carefully compose and readers usually follow in a full reading, is an attribute of the text, not the book. The reason many texts are linear has nothing to do with the technology of print.

A book as a technological artifact is highly interactive and non- linear. Grab one and you can flop it open in the middle, skip around, and thumb through its pages forwards or backwards. You can consult it in all sorts of odd sequences and quite often you do. With the index, a 500 year-old tool, you can hop around from topic to topic, nearly instantaneously. Publishers have long designed dictionaries, directories, and encyclopedias specifically for non- linear access, and reference books work well. Our fingers quite naturally apply enhanced binary-search algorithms on such volumes as we look an entry up. Books have little in their structure that is inherently linear.

Why then do we decry, with a seeming plausibility, the linearity of books? The answer is simple -- the text in most books is linear because writers and readers have chosen linear presentation, over the years, despite technical freedom to do otherwise. Proponents of hypertext should pay close attention to this fact. Encyclopedias are interactive documents. Writers craft entries for them assuming no continuity with what lies before and after. They include numerous cross references, links in the jargon of hypermedia. They are most useful works, but rarely do they hold us spell-bound by the suspense of the tale or the force of the argument. Good writing of many types is linear, not by technological necessity, but by the nature of the discourse.

Interactivity is not the special purview of text on-line. Linearity is not the curse of printed text. All books, as such, are interactive; some texts are interactive, when people specially design them for that purpose. Technological constraints do not determine the interactivity of such texts. No book is inherently linear, unless one were to trace the book back to its predecessor the scroll, and readers could even work scrolls interactively, back and forth. Many texts are linear because writers make them so, linking each paragraph to its predecessor with lineaments of artful diction, logic, and narrative tension. Thus, as with interactive texts, technological limitations do not cause texts to be linear. Quite the contrary, their linearity is a triumph of linguistic artifice over technologic artifact.

Such reflections suggest that we should rethink the hype about hypertext. If text on-line is to develop and flourish, it will probably recapitulate many virtues of printed text, especially those that writers and readers have imbued in text despite technological invitations to shape the work differently. One of those virtues is intelligible sequence, narrative form, compelling argument.

This virtue pertains, not only to text, but to other media as well. Most examples of video-oriented hypermedia seem sophomoric for they consist of brief, flashy clips, designed apart to stand alone. The emotional power of media lies largely in their cumulative effects, built sequentially over time. To randomize the shots of a great film dissolves it into meaningless sights, just as randomizing the notes of a symphony would turn it into cacophonous sounds. Those who are interested in using computers to communicate culture and ideas need to develop command, not only of interactivity, but also sequentiality and form.

As theorists of hypertext over-emphasize interactivity, so too they exaggerate the divide between text in-print and on-line. Few can any longer participate actively in contemporary culture without using digital information technologies, and fewer still can do so with recourse exclusively to those tools. For several generations, printed text will co-exist with electronic text. The crucial question is not when the latter will displace the former, but how the two can work most effectively together.

Readers will work with text both in print and on-line for many years to come. Currently they do so with a strange gulf between the two forms of presentation. Electronic information technology has had little effect on the conventions of print presentation. A well-designed book often has the same appearance it did several centuries ago. Readers of printed materials still use the conventions developed long before electronic technology. The few recent innovations in conventions, for instance APA citations, predate digital technologies. As we will argue, this situation should change, but for now computers have had no influence on the presentation of text in print.

Since printed text has not changed, users of on-line text face an annoying situation. To work with text on-line, they must either import the old conventions of print awkwardly into the new medium or they must struggle with new conventions of hypertext that are too often unpredictable and ineffective. Hypertext conventions simply do not intersect well with print conventions. The information that can lead a reader to a passage in print may not help get her to the same passage on-line, even if it exists in that form. Likewise, encountering a text on-line often leaves the reader with scant clues about how to find it in print. We need to change this situation.

Print conventions harbor anomalies that were trivial as long as print was the sole medium of presentation. With print, presentation pertains partly to text and partly to the paper page. As the conventions of print developed, for the most part they soundly integrated text and page layout. Things pertaining to text received appropriate textual conventions -- chapter and section breaks, paragraphing, sentence punctuation, spacing to visually separate words, footnoting and the like. Things pertaining to the page received page conventions -- page margins, running heads, text justification, and so on. A few things got confused, with textual concerns met through page conventions, the most significant of which involves pagination.

Page numbers are attributes of book layout that have nothing integral to do with the text. Yet, since the early conventions of printing, readers and writers habitually use them to indicate locations in a text. As scholars increasingly work with text both in print and on-line, this anomaly becomes more and more problematic.

Quite apart from electronics, any serious user of printed texts has at one time or another encountered the basic problem. In the critical essay you are reading, the author cites something interesting; you have the book on your shelf; oops, your edition is not the one the author cited. The page references do not work and you are left thumbing in frustrated hope that you can chance upon the cited text. The problem is simple: page references do not really address locations in a text, even though we habitually use them for that purpose. That is the basic confusion and its consequences are substantial.

Pages, and page numbers, are attributes of books, not the texts presented in books. Page numbers in texts are a major inconvenience in an environment in which readers will work with text both in print and on-line. Citations and quotations rely for the most part on elements of the text -- author, title, chapter divisions, the words of the text itself. A crucial part of the citation -- the actual location of the material cited -- depends on the edition, not the text, for we use page numbers to address locations in the text. With a few great works of religion, literature, and thought, standard page references have become established -- Plato, Republic, 492b, will take one to a key passage for understanding its educational theory regardless of edition. But the great majority of citations are edition dependent because we use pagination, unique to each edition, to specify the location in a text.

A simple alternative will assign each paragraph in a text a sequential number. Unlike the page number, the paragraph number is an attribute of the text and it will be thoroughly device and edition independent. With such numbering, a citation need give only author, title, and paragraph number. The citation should work for all versions of the text, whether it is in print or on-line, a first edition or an excerpted reprint. The technique is simple: a sequential number becomes an attribute of each paragraph and pagination drops from use. "Paragraph," of course, can broaden its base significance beyond written text here, referring, in addition to a distinct unit of thought in writing, to an image or composition in graphics, a sequence in animation, a shot in video, and a phrase in music. Creators should number their "paragraphs," whatever the medium. Power and Pedagogy prototypes these techniques.

Device independent referencing will benefit readers, whether they use printed or electronic texts. Most serious readers now have access to a computer and a good printer. With these tools, the dichotomy between printed and electronic media should breakdown. We talk about "printed books," but really what we mean by printed books are "pre-printed books." Before they are read, before they are sold, before they are even published and distributed, books get printed in quantity, usually with the full press run bound as well. This consumes much paper and labor, requiring substantial capital, and it creates bulk, costly to inventory and to ship, and then to shelve in bookstores and libraries. A significant portion of the cost of books arises from the practice of pre-printing them.

With device independent referencing, publishers can distribute books electronically via networks and disks, and readers can print those books and parts of books that they want to have in hard copy, in a form that suits their needs -- large type for one, big margins for another, even a synthesized audio reading for a third. With device independent referencing, each can cite the text in a way that works easily and accurately for all. Best of all, for those willing to work with electronic text, device independent referencing will enable readers to execute hyperlinks across complex networks without needing to know much about the location or format of the work they seek.

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