Annotated Bibliography!

Bromme, Rainer and Elmar Stahl, eds. Writing Hypertext and Learning: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches. Amsterdam: Pergamon, 2002.

Bromme and Stahl’s edited work is a fantastic and rich resource on the teaching and reception/learning of hypertext. The main purpose, as stated in the book’s introduction, is to give readers a general familiarity with what little has been said on the empirical and conceptual effects of learning hypertext. The collection of work that follows is a fierce collaboration of scholars who write on everything from the interference of linear and unlinear text, ideas of collaborative grading, the design (shape) of hypertext space, new ideas of authorship, to a new concept to me: hypervideo. For my research, the book is especially useful in chapters six and seven, where Karsten D. Wolf and A. Talamo and A. Fasulo write on the influence of hypertext on collaboration in the composition classroom.


Chakrabarti, Soumen. Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman, 2003.

Essentially a users manual to the mechanics behind a useful web mining program or search engine, this book is all mathematic jargon and algorithm building for the web programmer save one final section at its end entitled “Profiles, Personalization, and Collaboration.” Web mining, defined as “the automatic discovery of interesting and valuable information from the Web” (vii), may be understood as the ultimate trailblazing of hypertext as it is the programmer’s duty to effectively weed out useless lexia while sorting and ranking useful lexia. What makes this section of Chakrabarti’s manual interesting my research is that he states in his final chapter “The Future of Web Mining” that “despite their increasing sophistication, the most popular Web search engines remain impersonal” 305). Pointing to collaborative context analysis as the solution, Chakrabarti prophesies collaborative efforts to be the future of hypertext trailblazing. The academic connection between teaching collaborative hypertext media and this envisioned future of search engines has yet to be made.



Hanrahan, Michael and Deborah L. Madsen, eds. Teaching Technology, Textuality: Approaches to New Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillon, 2006.

Michael and Madsen’s handbook to teaching “new media” (a synonym for anything essentially hypertext) is geared toward the teacher who is entrenched in high literacy and stands at edge with his/her students who seems to despite all his/her efforts to be “illiterate.” Complete with a glossary that defines “WWW” and “wiki,” the handbook might be evaluated as an experienced teacher’s guide to beginning hypertext theory. What I enjoy about this work is its subtle support for e-literacy and up-front explanation of secondary orality as the result of “inherited, interiorized” literacy (1). What will most likely make it into my research is the book’s understanding and solution for student aversion to collaborative methods in the writing classroom.



Hutchby, Ian. Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity P, 2001.

Hutchby is, like McLuhan was, interested in how hypertext not only changes the way we communicate but also changes the cultural meanings about which we communicate. This work traces such an argument through multiple communication technologies (e.g. telephone, videophone, internet conferencing, artificial intelligence systems, computerized expert systems), but is especially useful to my research as it pertains to computerized media in general. Hutchby makes a two-part claim. First, that society shapes the way it uses technology. He supports this with the triumph of social constructivism, which claimed that social process has influence over all area of technology. This is important to me because it essentially proves that collaboration shapes technological use. Second, and much more theoretically, he claims that technology shapes sociality. This is important for my interest in collaboration because it suggests that contemporary hypertext theories, which have their basis in collaboration, shape discourse communities that inherently disenfranchise some and privilege others. Collaboration, then, is a skill or marketable attribute that privileges a student over others who are unwilling, scared, or unable to collaborate.



Katz, Steven B. The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing. Carbondale, IL: U of Southern Illinois P, 1996.

I chose this work because of its smart-sounding title and use of the words “temporal dimension.” Just kidding. I did choose to include it, though, because it is one of the few examples (outside of Ong, of course) to utilize the term “secondary orality” to describe the renewed importance of sound for today’s writer. Katz provides many examples of implementing a vocal element into composition courses, but all involve physically speaking and having students speak their writing. This is important for my research because it once again highlights collaboration at the forefront of creating better writers in the contemporary classroom. In every scenario Katz presents as the implementation of secondary orality in the classroom, a student speaks in order to receive insight into the importance of sound in the written word and receives. The student, then, must collaboratively decide with and against other students the emotional and social meanings that lie beneath those sounds. Its an interesting pedagogical model, but once again places collaboration at the center of a contemporary composition classroom.


McLuhan, Marshall and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Wildly influential, I choose to include The Global Village mainly because I knew it would interest my work in one way or another and, further, because I have always wanted to read it. And I was right to choose it. An eerily accurate portrait of an America thirty years in the making, McLuhan and Powers’ work makes powerful assumptions based on the iconic tetrad used as a pedagogical tool to teach the ways in which media enhance, retrieve, reverse, or negate social processes. These assumptions paint the America of 2020 as a county overrun with right-minded (or right-hemisphered) “robots” who “instead of being captured by point-to-point linear attitudes, so helpful to the mathematician and accountant, most Americans will be able to tolerate many different thought systems at once” (86). For my research, the implications of teaching collaboration become that much more important. It means that instead of viewing collaboration as simply working together, we must realize that collaboration threatens the importance of the singular authority and values the work of the society over the work of the individual. McLuhan and Bruce seem to paint this as a negative change for society (changing us from “angles to robots”), but I argue it in fact—in the long run—is not.



Torrance, Mark, Luuk Van Waes, and David Galbraith, eds. Writing and Cognition: Research and Applications. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007.

This collection of work summarizes the cognitive movement and specifically views the cognitive changes that take place with changing writing technologies. The entire collection is divided into three sections that deal with a history of interaction with the writing process, the effects of writing on cognition, and the various writing media. My research can be influenced especially by the final section, specifically in the chapters “Learning by Hypertext Writing: Effects of Considering a Single Audience Versus Multiple Audiences on Knowledge Acquisition” and “Supporting Individual Views and Mutual Awareness in a Collaborative Writing Task.” These two chapters continue to ask questions considering the loss of personal authorship to community in hypertext-enriched classrooms and seeks to suggest that in certain circumstances collaborative efforts in fact benefit the individual as it benefits the group.


Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2005.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997.

I have not yet had a chance to read these two works (I'm picking them up from the library today ... they're on loan from California.) But I wanted to include them just because I know I will be including them in the rough draft of my final project.