After I finished my Arts doctoral thesis and Education qualifications, and before I turned to Law, I worked as a part-time tutor in the Eng Lit dept at Glasgow University. I kept in touch with my medieval tutor, Des O’Brien, who was an extraordinary polymath. In 1987 he obtained a grant from the Computers in Teaching Initiative to set up the STELLA lab (Software for the Teaching of English Literature & Language and its Assessment), a network of IBM computers connected to a mainframe, each one with a whopping one megabyte of RAM. Three depts in the Arts were involved – English Literature, English Language and Scottish Literature & Language.
Des first showed me it in the summer of 1989. I had never used a computer before. I’d learned to touch-type my university essays on a portable typewriter, used a borrowed electric for my doctoral thesis type-up, and that was my engagement with technology. Here was a screen with text that was input and edited by using the keyboard and something called a mouse that moved a cursor around the screen. He showed me the text of Passus XX of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which he had typed with a ‘word processor’ into what he called software, and had annotated the text with – another exotic term – hypermedia links that made little boxes pop up on the screen. In the boxes were more texts that explained to students the literary, historical and theological background to this extract from Langland’s poem.
I was astonished – utterly entranced by it. If this could be done for Passus XX there was nothing to stop the whole of Piers Plowman being rendered in this way or any other literary text – just the labour of editing and programming. I wanted to know how to use Guide Hypermedia. Des gave me the manual, and access to the network, and I started to work through it, painfully slowly, as I learned the new language of object-oriented coding. I’d never used a word processor before, let along a hypertext program.
It’s difficult to imagine the world without internet and web, if you’re a millennial born into the digital north & west. For those of us born earlier into analog world, we can sometimes recall the shock of the first time we saw digital. Looking at Guide and coming to terms with what it was and its potential was just such a moment for me. The only mental equivalent I had to understand it with was that of an edited edition of a text, ie text and metatext, with the latter arrange near the text in foot- or end-notes. But that had a clear hierarchy where text was dominant.
Guide abolished that hierarchy: metatext could become text, leading to other texts, and metatexts could be adjacent to text. Adjacency, spatialization was key. And speed and variety of objects linked to – graphics, diagrams, photographs and much more. The closest model of that I could have had was that of another medieval text, namely glossed legal manuscripts, but I hadn’t come across many of those before I started researching legal education, a couple of years later, so wasn’t aware of the striking comparisons between glossed manuscripts and what would later become contemporary web literacy, post-1995 or so. As the graphics above show, OWL envisaged the program being used by corporations to improve information and document sharing: its model was commercial. Mine was academic, like Des and many others, eg in Oxford’s Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) Centre for Textual Studies. But the informational and structural problems were very close in both fields. I found that fascinating and puzzling, thinking it over later – it seemed to be partly a problem of spatialization.[1]
There’s a Wikipedia page on Guide that explains how the hypermedia text functioned; and a rich historical overview of the concept of hypertext, 1945-1995 by Jakob Nielsen here. Guide was originally released for the Mac, then IBM PC/AT (Apple soon after developed its own version, HyperCard). It functioned as a word processor and allowed users to create links between documents, add references, footnotes, graphics, etc. Text could be expanded or one could ‘jump’ from one text window to the next.
Looking back now, as a finished product it was a remarkable achievement.[2] It lacked some important navigational features, so it was sometimes easy for users to become lost in hyperspace. One time, when I was spending 18 hours a day on it, and drinking too much strong coffee, I began to hallucinate that I’d entered an enchanted medieval garden, where texts hung from trees, and I could reach up and pluck them down. The tree was real for me: I drew tree diagrams on sections of wallpaper to help me visualise the information structure I was creating before I coded the text chunks into Guide. It was the only way I could work to begin with, though I found that a 2D rendering of text in this way didn’t always represent the shift in meaning that happened when text became 3D in Guide.
As to what I was working on with this amazing software… There were any number of literary texts I could work on, following Des’s example, to produce something similar to his extract from Piers Plowman. But I was involved in university and adult education, and could see how it might be used for those purposes, too. In the 1980s the idea of skills as being an integral part of HE gradually began to be recognised widely. My friend, Professor Rowena Murray (outstanding literary & compositional scholar) and I read & discussed research from the US on compositional skills (she was much better read than I was in this field, having encountered it as a doctoral student at Penn State), and it was clear to me that much of this research could be put to good use in a digital environment to help students learn basic reading and writing skills.[3]
So with funding from the local Enterprise Unit in Glasgow University I added to the complement of STELLA’s suite of programs by creating WriteGuide – a program to help students write better essays. With another grant, I produced the same type of program for Mechanical Engineering students, assisting them to write better project reports (ReportGuide – I’d been working as a part-time tutor in various depts in GU as an academic literacy tutor, including MechEng). These programs helped students – I had positive feedback from them that proved the application of Guide hypertext to learning literacy skills could work, and that gave me confidence that digital had a role to play in HE literacy. This led me to my most ambitious project, the creation of a program for law students (the subject of the next blog post)
There are a number of useful points to make about my own learning in all this. First, STELLA was interdisciplinary, drawing together three disciplines in the Arts, and combining those with digital technologies. From that, I realised early on that digital could facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and research. Second, it struck me that the Arts disciplines that took enthusiastically to digital were those being marginalised in the academy – the Beowulf Workstation (Old English), the Perseus Project (Greek & the Humanities), Des’s experiment in medieval literature with Piers Plowman, others in Old Norse, and much later the Aberdeen Bestiary, or Merle Greene Robinson’s incredible rubbings of Maya sculpture.
Third, working with hypertext radically shifted my ideas about education and textual education in particular. Reading the hypertext literature produced in technical journals was difficult but it was necessary for me to chug my way through a new discipline. Some of it was almost millennarial thinking – it was exhilarating, kind of like reading the writings of early Quakers, Levellers, Diggers experiencing the revolutionary period of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Ted Nelson was an inspiration.[4] His concept of a joystick that when moved forward would reveal more and more detail of a text, when pulled back would render a text at a higher level of abstraction – that was a remarkable insight, the revelation of a tool that could be linked to discoursal detail and structure.[5] And of course there were the hypertext pioneers from the Arts, and for me literature especially – George P Landow, Jonathon Smith and many others. A whole new world of dazzling scholarly innovation opened up. The initial question for me then was, how was I going to use it, after my first experimental Guide programs? I’ll deal with that in my next post.
But thinking back at those first experiences of digital education, I find there are strong resemblances to my first experiences of AI a few years back. The same sense of astonishment, of dizzying potential, a sense too that digital was yet again changing the landscape of learning in Higher Education – all of it came back to me. More of that in the future few posts…
- [1]Even the spatial location of the new discipline created puzzlement within universities – should it be sited in Computing? In the specific disciplines using digital? Where should a CTI Centre for Textual Studies be sited in Oxford? Back in 1992, it was based in the Office for Humanities Communications – a title that gives no clue to the radical digital nature of the subjects it dealt with (now part of the Humanities Division). For an early description of STELLA see Deegan, M., Lee, S., Mullings, C. (1992). Computing in textual studies. Computers & Education, 19, 1-2, 183-91. From the abstract:
This article reviews the history of the CTI Centre for Textual Studies and examines some of the possibilities and problems of introducing CAL into arts-based subjects. Results of a major survey carried out on computing in the humanities during 1990 are given in brief, and the experiences of the STELLA Project in Glasgow, which has been using computers in the teaching of English Language and Literature for some years, are related.↩
- [2]Ian Ritchie, founder of OWL, was celebrated for meeting Tim Berners-Lee early in the development of URL, HTML & HTTP in the world wide web (originally on prototype Unix-based servers), and when TBL suggested Guide hypermedia as a front end for his team’s system, Ritchie turned him down – couldn’t see the commercial value in open standards (nice TED talk about that moment here). Around the same time, though, Marc Andreessen learned of TBL’s open standards, and created an interface, a browser, called Mosaic, later Netscape Communications – and with that, the open standards WWW took off, and proprietary Guide became a box on the shelf of history – I picked up the one shown above in a second-hand bookshop, ironically.↩
- [3]I summarised my early research and thinking on compositional literatures in this book chapter from What is Legal Education For?↩
- [4]See Nelson, Theodore, H. (1987). [Self-published in 1974]. Computer lib / Dream Machines. Rev. ed. Redmond, Wash. : Tempus. Nelson, Theodore, H. (1990). [Self-published in 1981]. Literary machines: the report on, and of, project Xanadu, concerning word processing, electronic publishing, hypertext, thinkertoys, tomorrow’s intellectual revolution, and certain other topics including knowledge, education and freedom. Sausalito, Cal. : Mindful Press. is remarkable. But it is also highly practical, and liberationist in intent.↩
- [5]Much later, as a cyclist I rode a recumbent tricycle called a Windcheetah that was guided with a joystick, incredible fun because everything to do with trike function was based around this one simple engineering feature. It was designed by a cyclist and engineer, Mike Burrows, and it changed my whole experience of what cycling was about. As did Ted Nelson on digital and hypertext.↩