by R. Brinlee

VA Tech is one of the nation's leaders in exploring the uses of computer technology in teaching and in the production and publication of scholarship (cf. The Cyberschool Project). A pair of manifestations of this initiative are the new guidelines being developed to enable the electronic publication of theses and dissertations at Virginia Tech; and the Newman Library has a working system for Electronic Reserve materials.

The particular features of this medium will inevitably shape the nature of the work to be published by means of it. Some changes one might anticipate are that:

• Such work will become immediately available to the widest possible audience and to all of its members at once.

• The audience of such work may not be entirely academic, and this too will shape the nature of the work.

• The work will contain links to other sites both local and remote which will constitute a web, or "docuverse," capable of being explored by multiple paths and capable of yielding more than one meaning.

• In the course of exploration or after, the audience will be able to respond immediately and conveniently to the work and to discuss it with the author and with other readers.

• Authorship will become more communal, and the weblike structure of hypertext will facilitate such authorship by accommodating diverse paths of investigation and points of view. Each reader will choose his/her own path (and in effect read a different text), and lacking a satisfactory path will suggest or forge a new one. Whereas in traditional scholarship a lone researcher asserts and demonstrates a thesis, which he/she implicitly challenges others to refute (probably one at a time), the authorship of hypertext will be implicitly communal and consist less in assertion than in exposition. It will invite democratic discussion rather than refutation, and the scholar's companions in this discussion--the readers/viewers/hearers of the work--will become its co-authors after the fact. The work will remain a discipline, but by e-mail, discussion lists and other uses of technology it will become a cooperation, and it will exist to provoke a many sided conversation of which the author is the convenor.

• Such work may become more fruitful because the author and his audience will maintain, revise and extend it over time (potentially a great improvement over the present situation in which few theses bear any fruit at all unless, resting undisturbed on their dusty shelf, they happen to rot and sprout). Thus, a thesis may cease to be an "academic exercise" and become the occasion of fuller learning and the beginning of a career through the author's consequent electronic contacts in the academic community.

• This sort of scholarly production will be ideally suited to teaching and to preparing teachers because it simulates the classroom. However the publication of hypertext on the web will create a classroom and a community of learning which reaches all around the world and whose members advise, support and educate one-another on-line.

• The increasing ability of the technology to incorporate sound (for example, the voices of writers or actors), lavish illustration and even video in on-line presentations will make them a richer cultural experience and will tend to dissolve the protective boundaries between humanistic disciplines and the fences around bits of academic turf. We may all become generalists again in the process of liberally educating one another.

• The peculiar character of hypertext--its ability instantly and at any point in the text to link the most diverse and far-flung resources to the author's purpose and submit the result immediately and conveniently to a similar audience--will accelerate this dissolving of boundaries.

• One may hope that the creative freedom which hypertext on the web will permit in the presentation of scholarship, acting upon the new profusion of means and material before a greatly enlarged and cooperating audience, will produce a renaissance in humanistic studies paralleling that produced by earlier advances in communications technology such as the invention of movable type.

Those of us who are a little alarmed by the computer--alien thing--sitting on our desk have a point. It is the engine of profound change in everything we have hitherto done and known about literature, the way it is composed and the way it is read and studied. How can we live with this? My suggestion is that we should discover its secrets, look behind the wizard's curtain, and explore the ways hypertext on the web can be used to further humanistic studies. We can't get away from it. It is already on our desks.