by Neil Fraistat, Steven Jones, and Carl Stahmer
[Fraistat, Neil, Steven Jones, and Carl Stahmer. "The Canon,
The Web, and the Digitization of Romanticism." Romanticism
On the Net 10 (May 1998) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/rcron.html>]
Whatever else it may be, "canonicity" is an effect produced by three
interrelated functions: a certain (perhaps loosely)
articulated list-like content; various cultural communities and institutions
that negotiate, produce, perpetuate, and consume that
content; and the material forms through which that content is embodied
and distributed. While most discussions of the canon
involve issues concerned with its content as such, less attention is
paid to the alignment of the communities who produce and
consume that content, and even less still to the way that the medium
of print has conditioned our notions of canonicity. In what
follows, we would like to address these issues in terms of the theoretical
and practical concerns we have confronted in
developing Romantic Circles as a scholarly Web site.
Romantic Circles was created by four Shelleyans, all of whom had worked
primarily on "second-generation" Romanticism and
hoped to be numbered among the many unacknowledged legislators of the
World Wide Web. For practical purposes,
Romantic Circles was initially designed to focus on that sub-field
and on the (canonical) authors we had published on or edited.
Nonetheless, we have from the start commissioned hypertextual editions
of and resources about other authors and works of the
Romantic period, deliberately employing the "circles" metaphor to suggest
the centrifugal expansion of concentric ripples that
we believed would ultimately characterize any intellectually vital
Web site. One of the strengths of Web publishing is that it
facilitates--even favors--the production of editions of texts and resources
of so-called non-canonical authors and works. This is
in part a function of the relative simplicity of HTML (and all of the
simpler document-type-descriptions of SGML) and of
"workstation publishing" in general when compared to traditional commercial
or academic letterpress production and
distribution methods. But it is also a function of hypertext itself,
which allows, for instance, an ephemeral newspaper ballad its
own privileged, fully "centered" space on the reader's screen--no less
prominent than any famous High Romantic lyric
poem--readily invoked at its own direct-access URL with a single click.
In a different way than with each page of a codex
book, each "screen shot" of the Web, at least momentarily, becomes
the center of the user's attention. It is worth pausing for a
moment to consider the theoretical underpinnings of this drive toward
canonical "decentering" via a mechanism of hypothetically
perpetual "centering," for it presents a somewhat different reading
of the radical potential of hypertext than those offered by
most current theorists of the medium--one that bears importantly upon
our current discussions of canonicity.
Since the earliest days of cyber-cultural critique, destabilization
of the text has stood as the common thread in most
literary-based thinking on, about, and in, hypertext. A certain randomness
that is characteristic of the postmodern seems to lie
at the technological heart of hypertext as a meaning-producing medium.
Whether conceived from Barthes' perspective of the
writerly reader who is set free to move at whim from link to link in
the production of her own unique text, or from Deleuze and
Guattari's perspective of the Web itself as a rhizomatic knowledge
producer, the hypertextuality of the Web might appear to be
a powerful medium for undoing the canon. The canonical "list" ultimately
becomes meaningless in the first place because
everything is now on it, and in the second place because the integrity
of its lowest level discrete units--literary texts--risks
obliteration from a rhizomatic system of linkages with no meta-order.
It might seem, therefore, that the increasing digitization of literary
texts in itself portends the death of the canon. But things are
never quite so simple. However threatening to the canonical list the
destabilizing and decentralizing potential of hypertextuality
might seem, one cannot overlook the fact that the most common organizational
strategy on the Web is the list. At some very
real experiential level, rhizomatic knowledge appears to be unsatisfying
to the average user, who spends most of his time surfing
links from meta-lists rather than following links within documents
in search of information. We thus find ourselves in a situation
where the surface structure of the meaning-making mechanism appears
to run counter to its deep structure. Hypertextuality
may, in and of itself, be decentralizing, but the Web, as a hypertext
collection, seems to work against this decentralization in
important ways. Whether this is because, as Jameson suggests about
postmodernism in general, we lack the cognitive tools to
deal with the effects of decentralization and fragmentation, or because,
from a more Foucaultian stance, the knowledge
potentialities of each hypertext unit are themselves engaged in a power
struggle which operates outside of the agency of
individual subjects, is of little importance. What is important is
that we recognize the logic of these two counter-tendencies and
try to learn how to operate dialectically in the space between them
rather than falling into the trap of assuming that one of two
binary poles represents the "true" nature of the medium.
A model for understanding this type of apparently self-conflicted meaning-making
arguably can be found in Romantic theories
of poetics--a fact that may help explain why so many Romanticists,
even if they are deeply skeptical of the medium, are at the
same time enthralled by it. Take, for example, the poetics of Shelley--the
shared scholarly pursuit of all four of Romantic
Circles' General Editors--whose fundamental organizing principle (as
it is now commonplace to observe) is always dialectically
to assert meaning while at the same time deconstructing it. As a project,
Romantic Circles conceives of itself analogously, as
being to some degree both centering and decentering, selective and
all encompassing, canonical and non- or extra-canonical--if
not exactly simultaneously, then in a constant series of shifting,
toggling possibilities and to a hyper-extent that would have been
welcomed by our Romantic predecessors.
Of course, as General Editors of a site named "Romantic Circles" that
prides itself on being a rigorously vetted publishing arena,
we recognize that we are engaged in an act of canon formation (or perpetuation).
Regardless of how inclusive we become, we
do make decisions about which texts and resources belong on our site.
And yet, do what we will, the dialectical nature of
hypertextuality is always working at the same time to undermine any
attempt at exclusion. On the other hand, however, as we
bring to the "center" previously marginalized texts, we participate
to some degree in canon reformation, if only within the context
of an admittedly disciplinary paradigm. As Romanticists in the first
place, we are not, after all, actively commissioning electronic
editions of contemporary Chicana poets. Nonetheless, a commissioned
Romantic-period work on our site could easily link to
an online edition of such a poem (produced by one of our contributors
or by someone else). The nature of the medium thus
works against our own attempts at disciplining knowledge--a fact which
we welcome and encourage. This does not, however,
free us from the responsibility of recognizing and understanding the
logics behind and the implications of our initial exclusionary
moves--especially as they relate to issues of canon formation.
Following what looks like a traditional model of canon expansion (as
seen recently in the new wave of letterpress anthologies of
Romanticism, for example), we will cast our editorial net wider in
the coming months. In the first quarter of 1998, we have
begun introducing several new texts and other resources that will allow
us to remove the names of the second-generation
writers from our logo, as we have planned for some time:
This kind of subtle erasure and concomitant expansion--or hyper-canonization--will,
we expect, greatly enrich Romantic
Circles and its ability to further affect canonicity.
But we are also committed to providing resources and virtual fora for
theoretical reflection upon and discussion of the Romantic
Canon. Our first major effort in this direction was the mounting this
past fall of two new resources. The first is an Anthologies
Page, edited by Harriet Kramer Linkin, Laura Mandell, and Rita Raley,
a resource that makes available, among other things,
the tables of contents for all of the many recent anthologies of Romanticism
(linked to a powerful search engine), providing an
invaluable material base for anyone wishing to think about recent reassessments
and implementations of the Romantic Canon.
Another important feature of the Anthologies Page is its rich (and
interactive) section on discussions of anthologies and canon
reform. This feature makes a good companion piece for the second of
our two new resources on the canon: a superb
discussion thread on NASSR-L that we have mounted in the Scholarly
Resources section of Romantic Circles under the title
"Reading Hemans, Aesthetics, and the Canon: An Online Discussion".
We hope that teachers of Romanticism will choose to
incorporate these resources into their syllabi for a specific class
or set of classes focused on the Romantic canon, a strategy that
we have heard has already been adopted successfully in a few graduate
courses taught this past semester.
Perhaps even more significant, however, than helping to change the lists
of which works and authors get taught and read--or
providing theoretical discussions of such changes--will be our continued
experiments with the very forms and infrastructure of
online scholarly communication. Through such experiments Romantic Circles
may have its greatest impact on "the canon"--by
testing and perhaps altering the ways in which knowledge gets made
and transmitted. This process will involve thinking about
the electronic medium not just as "hypertext," but as leading to a
series of vital, distributed networks, some of which cross
traditional boundaries of academic discipline, collaborative group,
and professional affiliation. In what follows, we want to focus
briefly on one such initiative, the creation of Romantic Circles High
School, an attempt to move several of our most important
theoretical commitments into praxis by realigning two communities crucial
to the production and consumption of canonicity in
general and the Romantic Canon in particular. Our ultimate goal in
this project is to build an experimental online community of
educators and their students: across state (and even national) boundaries--but
also across the sometimes more daunting border
that separates secondary education from higher education in this country.
Through such a project, then, the digitization of
Romanticism comes to explore fundamental questions not just about the
canon as such, but also about the institutional forms of
education itself and the ways those forms might be reimagined on the
World Wide Web. In describing our plans for Romantics
Circles High School below, we hope to provide an example of one form
that reimagination might take.
Without doubt, the advent of the World Wide Web and real-time virtual
environments has for the first time made possible on
the Internet as a whole collaborative and distributed teaching--and
at minimal cost to participating schools or individual
classrooms. But major barriers still stand in the way, including (to
our minds, most immediately) the poor quality and general
unreliability of many of the resources currently available online.
There is a pressing need for educational resources on the Web
that would contain accurate and reliable information, produced by experts
under peer-review and general editorial oversight;
that would take advantage of the interactive possibilities of the medium
to go beyond the home-page format to create sites of
intellectual exchange and activity, where meetings of various kinds
can take place and diverse forms of knowledge can be built
through collaborative effort; and that would keep its markup and server-end
technology flexible and up-to-date enough to
continue to be usable as platforms and browsers inevitably change over
time.
Over the next three years, we hope to build Romantic Circles High School
according to these criteria as a site that, while
dedicated to the special curricular goals and practices of literary
study in secondary education, places those goals and practices
in dynamic dialogue with those of literary study in institutions of
"higher education." To this end, we plan to develop a collection
of materials created by and for the special curricular and pedagogical
needs of secondary education--while linking this new
development to our higher-education resources, breaking down the clear
divisions between the two in favor of a more
permeable border. This will be accomplished by setting up clearly signposted
hyperlinks from the more elementary to the more
complex kinds of textual and historical resources, for example, and
running regular discussion threads involving both college and
high school teachers.
With the help of Brenda Walton, a high school teacher (and Romanticist)
in Lakeland Florida, who will serve as "Principal" of
Romantic Circles High School, and with the hoped for support of outside
grants, we plan to develop over the next three years
resources for the site in meetings (face-to-face as well as online)
in which the General Editors of Romantic Circles will work
with teams of high school teachers in our home bases: California, Maryland
and the District of Columbia, Chicago, and Florida.
These focus groups will "seed" a new network, providing a community
of primary contributors and participants, and also
providing a valuable means for publicizing and disseminating information
about the site, and a way to attract new participants in
their districts. In the year following our initial meeting, each member
of a focus group, working with their classes, will contribute
at least one new electronic resource for review and possible inclusion
on the site.
Besides this effort to distribute the ideas and methods of Romantic
Circles High School, we intend for the project as a whole to
serve as a more widely accessible model and large-scale pilot program--its
results fully public on the Web--for others to
participate in, imitate, and improve upon. Beyond new hypertexts and
study tools meant for high school use--virtual field trips,
collaborative class project pages, timelines and maps, student writing,
curricular models--we hope to exploit the possibilities of
real-time online communication, in particular, as a medium within which
to conduct pedagogical experiments. The centerpiece
of the whole will be an entirely new "wing" added on to Romantic Circles'
existing MOO ("Multi-User Dimension, Object
Oriented"), an online conference and meeting center we call the "Villa
Diodati," named after the house on Lake Geneva where
in 1816 Byron, Shelley, and Mary Shelley talked and told each other
stories--and where Mary Shelley began her most famous
novel, Frankenstein. For this project we will build, "furnish," and
then develop a series of virtual spaces dedicated exclusively
to Romantic Circles High School for the learning of Romantic period
literature and culture. Among these will be:
A virtual Teachers Lounge, where teachers from
around the country could log-in for real-time live communication,
posting assignments and curriculum ideas,
queries to colleagues, meetings, or help from other teachers on the teaching
of
literature. (This will be an open space cutting
across the existing barriers between secondary and higher education
colleagues.)
Online Classrooms, where students can meet
for lectures, presentations, or open discussions. These rooms will be
programmed in different configurations: informal
discussion areas where multiple participants interact; moderated
discussion rooms where speakers must queue
up and only two or three are allowed to speak at once (but an unlimited
number of others can "listen"); and one-way
"lecture halls."
Virtual Offices, where teachers and selected
and trained graduate tutors from around the country can meet, one
on-one or in small groups, with one or two
students for "MOOtorials"--concentrated tutoring in literary studies. (Existing
tutoring programs in our home institutions
will contribute to this resource.)
The RC High Online Auditorium, which would
be used for special events, formal guest lectures by speakers from
around the world, faculty meetings, "assemblies,"
readings from literary works, or student "recitals" demonstrating their
own work to a larger online audience. To introduce
this space, we will hold a major culminating event, the Online
National Teachers Conference described below.
Literary "worlds": online "spaces" for exploratory
learning, including navigating famous locations, real or imaginary.
For example, students could "visit" the Keats
house in Rome or Coleridge's "Xanadu," by typing directional and
manipulative commands. In response they would
see changing descriptions of the space, or links to images on the Web,
as well as the messages and movements of other
participants sharing and moving through the same space. (One
inspirational current example of such an application
is "Point Rash Judgment: the Exploration of a Wordsworth Text.")
These worlds can also easily be programmed
as places for virtual "artifact handling": the examination and studying
of
everything from an Aeolian harp (complete
with image and sound), to a poet's rare manuscript or rough-draft notebook
(never before made available to a high school
student), to a nineteenth-century "Claude glass" (a special curved mirror
for viewing and sketching "picturesque" landscapes)--each
teaching valuable historical and cultural lessons through
hands-on interaction and questioning, an active
engagement in the process of discovery.
As we are currently discovering at Romantic Circles, MOO spaces, real
time online environments, are educationally effective
on several fronts: because they are text-based, their use helps improve
language and rhetorical skills; students must write to
communicate with a very real "auditor"--sometimes many at one time.
Still, because it is spatially-conceived, the MOO appeals
to and draws in those students who have difficulties with such verbal
skills. And because it is interactive and inherently "playful,"
it helps improve social and communication skills. All of this enhances
this technology's use as a tool in the study of literature and
culture of the past, subjects which often seem dead and remote from
the student's concerns, something passively to be
consumed. On the contrary, these tools encourage the actively participating
student to help make literary knowledge--and
make it her or his own. As we look to the future (and given the rate
of change the Internet has undergone in the last few years,
this is not easy but is more than ever necessary), it is clear that
educators will have to think beyond the Web as it currently
exists. Such online virtual spaces is one direction educational technology
is likely to evolve.
The key to the Romantics Circles High School project as a whole (and
to Romantic Circles itself), from our meetings with
educators to the way we build resources and have them evaluated, is
collaboration. Anyone who has spent much time online
knows that communities are not created simply by putting up Web pages,
but on the other hand a community can be built using
Internet resources at its center--as its infrastructure and shared
point of focus. Teachers and students around the country will
work with us as partners to actually create online resources for other
teachers and students to use. In this way, we hope to
build an educational community, making learning an active form of knowledge-production.
Such an approach can radically
change the relationship of a student to the material, between students
and teachers, and among students themselves--as they
work together in a larger national online community to build new forms
of education, and to produce knowledge of the
humanities for themselves and others.
Such collaboration takes a very concrete form in this case. Our hardware
and software will provide the infrastructure for a wide
range of high school projects around the country. We will actually
provide accounts on our server for classrooms that might not
otherwise have access to the Internet. There is a great deal of talk
these days about "putting computers in the schools," but less
is said (or understood) about the server-side needs of education. Our
server and site will provide a rare avenue of distributed
access, giving students and educators the means to become not consumers
or "users" but content providers and producers of
the resources they and others like them will use.
We believe that this kind of collaborative production of knowledge will
have a radical effect on the canon as it is currently
constituted. In opening the academic discourse community to a much
wider audience, representing a greater range of
backgrounds, interests, and situations, it promises to alter that community's
overall perception of aesthetic and historical value.
Moreover, the changes in the structure of communication and knowledge
production necessary to make this collaboration
possible will in themselves have a dramatic impact on what is judged
deserving of inclusion in the canon. With this in mind, as a
capstone for the initial development of Romantics Circles High School,
we plan to run in October 2000 a major event: an
"Online National Teachers Conference" focused on issues of canonicity,
the Web, and the digitization of Romanticism. We will
hold planning sessions and solicit papers (some from our pool of focus
group participants but also drawn from a general call for
papers), leading up in the fall to a 2-3 day virtual conference in
the Romantic Circles High School MOO space, with online
presentations (readable by a wide group of participants)--including
keynotes on video conference CU-SEE ME
links--moderated roundtable discussions, and open fora in the conference
center, as well as informal meetings and social
interactions among selected teachers and other guests from around the
nation. With participants from both secondary schools
and higher education, such a conference will provide an important occasion
for assessing the success with which the World
Wide Web and the Net in general has been able so far to realign academic
communities, as well as to intervene in the
production and transmission of literary canons and scholarly knowledge.
But beyond this assessment, we hope that the
conference will also spur practical and theoretical developments in
all of these areas, perhaps even aiding in the conception of
new digital arts and practices, which--in the words of Shelley-- "tho'
unimagined, [are] yet to be."
Neil Fraistat, Steven Jones, and Carl Stahmer
University of Maryland, Loyola University, University of California Santa
Barbra
Copyright © The Editor Romanticism On the Net 1998 - All rights reserved
Read / Send comments to The Forum