4. intermission
Another Story: In 1998, working with a team of graduate students at Purdue University, we constructed a collaborative hypertext consisting exclusively of fragments of other texts we'd used during the semester: philosophies of communication, edited collections on technology and theory, email messages from our University President, and more. Working in Storyspace, we generated a massively interconnected Web of textual fragments. Excited, we shipped the URL to the site off to the Web based journal PostModern Culture. Reviews were decidedly mixed: The first reviewer thought the site was the greatest thing since CheezeWhiz. The other two reviewers, unfortunately, strongly suggested rejecting the site, because it didn't contain any of our own text.
johndan johnson-eilola | http://www.clarkson.edu/~johndan/ | johndan@clarkson.edu