Dear all,
I would like to comment briefly on Andre Costopoulos' response to the
paper I published in Internet Archaeology 6 about my experiences of
writing and submitting a hypermedia Ph.D. thesis. Perhaps we can
continue the discussion on the list -- and bring this list alive!
First of all, I am glad to have stimulated Andre to write about his own
experiences with a dissertation submitted on CD. This discussion is very
timely and badly needed for both (prospective) doctoral candidates and
their Universities in order to keep up with the fast developing
potentials of electronic media. Whatever your own standpoint is
regarding the issues of this discussion, it is of the greatest
importance that this position is well founded and up-to-date with
current developments. I have still got a lot to learn myself about the
possibilities of electronic writing, and I would be very keen to hear
from list-members about any interesting trends or new developments!
As to the content of Andre's response, I find myself in agreement with
most of it. Electronic media do, of course, offer wonderful
possibilities of storing large files and data-sets, and I can only
congratulate him to his own project which sounds very interesting
indeed. There are, however, two points I wish to clarify in relation to
my own work.
(1) Based on his experience of a very easy acceptance of electronic
submission of his thesis by the relevant committees of the University of
Oulu, Andre suggests that my own 'saga' may have taken longer and be
more problematic because committee members were worried about my message
of writing and arguing in a new (hypermedia) format. All I can say is
that I have no evidence which would support such a view. As should be
clear from my documentation
(http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue6/holtorf/page5.html), issues that
were raised by various people and committees touched on the content or
the writing style of my thesis only very peripherally, and were almost
exclusively concerned with matters of examination, storage medium,
permanent accessibility etc. They certainly never questioned (in
writing--which is all I can go by) the idea of a non-linear argument as
such. My supervisor, my Head of Department, and the Director of the
Academic Computing Services, all expressed explicit support for my way
of arguing. In connection with my thesis no evidence whatsoever emerged
which would support Andre's suggestion that there is a particular
resistance in the academic community to aspects of hypermedia theory and
their application to scientific discourse. Andre's claim that non-linear
writing is unsuitable to 'the spirit of scientific enterprise' is
obviously not shared by all and reflects more his own particular
standpoint.
(2) Andre questions whether reading a 'conventional' text and reading a
hypertext, as I described it, is really all that different. As I said in
the passage cited by him, the main difference -- and this is a radical
difference -- consists in the fact that, unlike hypermedia documents,
conventional texts suggest a proper, linear, form of the argument --
with some parts of a text being more relevant to the argument than
others (think of prefaces, footnotes, appendices etc). Although of
course all texts can be read, and often are read, in chunks (as Andre
says), only hypermedia documents invite readers openly to do that, and
they leave in fact the reader no other choice than making choices. I
stated in my original paper also that "In a way, an open
non-sequentiality of writing is also more honest to the actual practice
of reading and understanding, because the different pages correspond to
various interconnected mental 'chunks' into which we tend to break up
complex issues in order to make them intelligible".
Anyone with comments on these issues, or in fact, anything else relating
to the discussion about electronic dissertations? I would love to hear
about your experiences or opinions...
Cornelius
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