The AVS 6 Hypermedia in the humanities group at the start of the Fall
semester 1996 comprised in all four students to begin with. The table
below gives an overview of their previous academic background and
their prior experience with the use of computers in general, e-mail,
World Wide Web and DMCE's:
|
Name[11] |
Age |
Academic |
Writing |
Computer |
|
WWW |
DMCE |
|
Tone |
|
NL; EL; Li |
4 |
some |
some |
some |
no |
|
Bjørn |
|
Lt; Me |
2 |
some |
some |
little |
yes |
|
Sigrun |
|
RS,Lt |
1 |
some |
little |
little |
no |
|
Giorgio/ Jørgen |
|
CE; Li |
? |
much |
much |
much |
no |
Below I have provided a brief, but more comprehensive, personal profile of each of the course participants who joined the group at the beginning of the Fall semester 1996. For those group members who subsequently took part in DMCE-sessions I have also included their login character pseudonyms in order to make it easier to understand the logs of the DMCE conversations which we shall go on to look at in some more detail in a later section.
With regard to the amount of detail that is provided in the profiles
below, it seems appropriate to point out that the information given
here has been gleaned from several sources:
1. the questionnaires filled out by the students at the beginning of the semester
2. the subsequent presentations of themselves given by the group members in our sessions together face-to-face in the seminar room.
3. subsequent conversations in the group, either in the face-to-face seminar room, the lab or in our DMCE-sessions
4. participants' home pages
All the information given here has however subsequently been read by those it concerns, and permission given to use it in the present form.
Obviously, there can be a number of ethical problems involved in representing other participant-observers in a research project of this kind in such a relatively detailed fashion in a ethnographic narrative of this kind. It is for instance more or less common practice in much conventional scientific writing, especially in such fields as anthropology, sociology, ethnography, linguistics and psychology to deliberately anonymize "informants" as much as possible and to avoid providing any kind of personal information which may later be traced back to the real life people involved. On the other hand, within the framework of this particular research project, a quite fundamental part of taking part in the various kinds of scientific writing activities that we have carried out in distributed virtual environments during the course is learning how to (re)present oneself and what one is interested in, for others one does not know in advance in an effective and engaging way.
At this point it seems appropriate to comment briefly on why I believe that these kinds of skills may be becoming increasingly important for scientific authors in general.
A Home Page published on the World Wide Web will in principle be accessible for anyone who cares to read it anywhere in the world, and will very often make public a quite comprehensive personal presentation of its author, often in the form of a curriculum vitae.
In the same way, when one obtains a character for working and communicating in a DMCE, one is encouraged actively to write a personal description for other people to read before, or while, they talk to you, so that they can get some idea of who the person they are communicating with is.
Something that is emerging as a quite central problem in the context of this particular project is how to represent other participant-observers' individual voices in a precise, truthful and meaningful way. Obviously as I sit here and write down my reflections about what happened in the course of our series of face-to-face and DMCE seminars during the hypermedia in the humanities course last Fall, what I actually select as the focus of interest, and the various ways in which I choose to represent and interpret the events I am writing about will be strongly coloured by my own subjective perceptions and experiences of the situation as it gradually unfolded. This kind of subjective colouring of the narrative space as it unfolds is of course quite unavoidable, and may also be seen as something natural and advantageous in many ways. But at the same time, as a possible corrective to the one-sidedness of this kind of presentation of my own understandings and interpretations, it seems both contingent on me and ethically important to attempt to incorporate as correctly as possible as much as possible of other participant-observers' voices into the narrative as it is developing.
Interestingly, this problem of how to bring other voices into a narrative of this kind reflects, on a metaphorical level at least, an often forgotten linguistic and philosophically interesting phemomenon which was managed in languages such as ancient Greek and Sanskrit by means of a particular verb form construction known as "the middle voice". Benveniste (1971 [1950])
In such languages there were three, rather than two forms of voice
(or diathesis), namely the active, passive and middle voice. Both the
active and passive voice are of course well known from modern
languages such as English, French and Italian and are functionally
and structurally distinguishable from one another through different
lexical verb-forms and syntactical organizations of sentences.
In English, the active voice of the verb [to take] might for example
be represented (here in past tense) in the following way:
1. X took Y.
while the passive voice for the same verb might be represented in the following way:
2. Y was taken by X.
The difference between the functional meaning correlates of these two particular verb-forms is to begin with tied in with which participating entity is foregrounded as the main focus of attention in the sentence.
In 1. the focus of attention is an active agent [X] who (or which) is the one doing the taking. Another way of saying this is that entity [X] in this case is Theme, representing new information, while entity [Y] is Rheme, representing old, or known information.
In purely propositional terms, this would be equivalent to saying that:
There exists some entity [X] (active)
[X] (active) [took] [some existant entity (passive)]
There also exists some passive entity [Y], which is that entity taken by entity [X]
[therefore] [X] took [Y]
In 2. the focus of attention is on [Y] which was taken by X. Here it is entity [Y] which is Theme, while entity [X] is Rheme.
In propositional terms, this would be equivalent to saying that:
There exists some entity [Y] (passive)
[Y] (passive) [was taken by] [some existant entity (active)]
There also exists some active entity [X], which is that entity which took entity [X]
[therefore] [Y] was taken by [X]
In 1. it is entity [X) who is the active agent taking entity [Y], and since entity [X] is placed in focus by selection of verb-form and the general syntactical arrangement of the sentence as acting on entity [Y], this active agency is foregrounded, as in:
[X] (active, agent) took [Y] (passive, non-agent)
In 2. it is the passive non-agent entity [Y] that is being acted upon by entity [X], and it is this passive non-agency that is foregrounded.
[Y] (passive, non-agent) was taken by [X] (active, agent)
The middle voice verb-form in ancient Greek differs both morphologically from both the active and passive voice, and in a functional semantic way by having other connotations of meaning than both these.
|
Active Voice |
Meaning |
Middle Voice |
Meaning |
|
arien |
take |
airesthai |
choose |
|
amunein |
ward off |
amunesthai |
defend |
|
apotropein |
turn aside |
apotropesthai |
to swerve |
|
tropein |
turn |
tropesthai |
wend |
|
logon poiein |
compose a speech |
logon poiesthai |
deliver a speech |
|
gamein |
marry (of a man) |
gamesthai |
to wed (of a woman) |
Had a third form of voice in modern English existed it would, by merely using a specific morphological variant of the lexicogrammatical item ` take' (c.f. the ancient Greek ` arien' above) to represent the middle voice verb-form (c.f. the ancient Greek ` airesthai' above), be possible to express the following meanings:
3a. [X] chose [Y] (active schema)
3b. [Y] was chosen by [X] (passive schema)
Today it is not possible to make this kind of semantic distinction through purely morphological means in modern English, since the middle voice form has disappeared from this language. In order to make the particular semantic distinction expressed in ancient Greek by selection of the middle voice form of the verb it is only actually possible to realise this particular contextual web of meanings in English as above by means of a specific choice at the word level of the lexicogrammar (the semantic meanings above being shown relative to how they might be expressed in both active and passive voice forms), namely the verb ` choose' (or ` select' ), as opposed to ` take'.
According to White (1997, p. 11), Benveniste considered the development of the passive voice in Indo-European languages a late development. The critical distinction for diathesis had originally been between what later came to be referred to as the "middle", which expressed the condition of the "interiority" of the subject in relation to the action being signified by the verb, and the "active", which expressed "exteriority" in relation to the action being signified by the verb, whether as agent (active) or patient (passive). White goes on to say "... in both the active and the passive, the tenses of the verb express a relation of diremption or separation between the time of the inauguration of the action and the time of its completion. In the middle voice it is quite different, here actions and their effects are conceived to be simultaneous; past and present are integrated rather than dirempted, and the subject and object of the action are in some way conflated. All this is connoted in Barthes' use of the notion of the middle voice to suggest the relation obtaining between the modernist "writer" and the activity of "writing"." (White 1997, p. 12) This type of relation between the three voices may be schematised in a more general way as follows:
Active voice [X] (active, agent, exterior to action) take [Y] (passive, non-agent, exterior to action)
Passive voice [Y] (passive, non-agent, exterior to action) take (by) [X] (active, agent, exterior to action)
Middle voice [X] (active, agent, interior to action) take [Y] (passive, non-agent, interior to action)
Notion of ergativity (Halliday), example:
The car broke
The car was broken by X
X broke the car
The notion of middle voice can be shown to be related to wider issues such as representational ethics and also such things as the expression of group and gender identity (Hayden White, personal communication, May 1997). The most important function of the middle voice in ancient Greek was to express a certain attitude or position taken by the speaker or writer in relation to situations where ethical, identity-creating, choices needed to be made. When it was used, this implied a different degree of involvement on the part of the subject in the wider ethical implications of the situation, and suggested that a different course of action had been opted for in relation to the actualisation of these implications. A consideration of the concept of a middle voice goes beyond the duality inherent in the notions of active and passive voices in modern English and may for example move us towards considerations of how to facilitate an "ascendency to voice" of groups previously denied access to central civil or human rights (Hayden White, personal communication, May 1997).
In relation to this present project, this notion raises some important issues in relation to, as mentioned above, how to legitimise and include other voices in an action-interior way within the context of an ethnographic narrative of this kind, which, as also pointed out above, is essentially a representation of one particular perspective or position.
One way of doing this which I tried out in the previous report I wrote from this project is by citing and commenting on DMCE log-materials, e-mail correspondance and other kinds of texts, such as for instance individual (but in this case, nonetheless anonymous) examination submissions written by participants in the hypermedia in the humanities group in the Fall of 1995. A strategy of this kind, however, still does still not in any way preclude that the various selections I might decide to make of sections of these texts, and the interpretations that I subsequently go on make of them will only reflect my own quite possibly seriously skewed perspectives on what was actually going on.
Another way to tackle this problem is to ask the participants themselves to comment on and correct or supplement the selections and interpretations I have made after the event, as I did with the first group of students. However, in practice, this strategy only succeeded in producing some rather lukewarm positive comments from the students, in the sense that those I asked all said that they thought that the way the materials had been used was reasonable. In retrospect, I can see that this particular way of working has very little to recommend it. It cannot, after all, be very engaging to be asked to comment on someone else' s interpretations of some set of events, especially when you yourself have been a part of what went on, and especially when these interpretations are presented in some kind of ñready-madeî form. In a sense, what this amounts to is receiving an invitation to take part in a collective interpretational and writing process, only to find that the invitation has been issued after the event, and after one particular person' s perspective has already been worked out in quite some detail.
This is very different from the kind of open-endedness that we are
able to experience while taking part in a face-to-face conversation
in a public space, such as in a group, where in principle all those
present can intervene to criticise or comment on other
interpretations or points of view as they are actually in the process
of being presented, and in doing so, actively contribute to setting
the agenda for the further development of the conversation in
general, and thus also contribute to setting the agenda for which
specific themes or topics will be foregrounded in the conversation as
it develops
Seen from a more ideal point of view it would obviously be much more
preferable if I was able to have access to much more feedback on, and
discussion of, the interpretations I am making while I am still in
the process of making them.
However, as I sit here writing this now in Italy, I am experiencing many of the practical and organisational difficulties that the realisation of this particular kind of aspiration actually can present, since all the other participants mentioned in this particular report are physically in other countries, and it is not merely a matter of arranging face-to-face meetings in the cantine or a seminar room where I might show them some rough notes and ideas and ask them what they think about it. In this kind of situation an obvious solution is to use e-mail and a DMC environment to carry on a continuous dialogue around this process with the other participants. Seen more realistically however, it is not immediately apparent that the amount of work involved for all parties in making this kind of co-operation functional necessarily is perceived as being proportional to the amount of benefit for all that might accrue from it, so that a certain amount of planning and restraint is needed in order to work effectively in this kind of way.
Something on the experiences we had in the Spring and Summer of
1997 with follow-up work.
Lack of response to questions, time elapsing between mails sent and
responses received. Unfulfilled promises to comment, Tone's
pregnancy, Bjørn's lack of time.
On Sigmund Ongstad's notion of `positioning'.
On Hilde and Alice, who had more developed and expressed personal agendas related to this particular area of research. Different kinds of motivations and positioning "needs". The real everyday world of being a student, and that of being a researcher. General perceptions within academia, specially the humanities, of the utility and functionality of such things as DMCE's.
The oldest, and in many ways most academically experienced member
of the group was Jørgen (also known as Giorgio). Born in
Italy, and now resident in Norway since 1984, Jørgen had begun
his academic career in 1981 studying electronical engineering at the
Politecnico di Milano in Milan. After a couple of years there he had
transferred to Norway where he completed his civil engineering degree
in electronics and telematics at the then Norwegian Institute of
Technology. He had subsequently taken a course in computer-supported
learning at the department of computer science at the then University
of Trondheim faculty of Physics, Informatics and Mathematics. In 1989
he had decided to follow up his interest in language, and begun
studying linguistics. When he joined our course group he was in the
later stages of working on his masters thesis in linguistics which
was an investigation into sound perception among speakers of an
Italian dialect from the Lombardy - Lugano region of Italy.
Jørgen was the only student in the group whom I already knew,
since we had met some years ago while he was working on an
interactive self-study program he was developing for the introductory
phonetics course offered by the department of linguistics. He was
also working as research assistent in a research project based at at
the department of linguistics by the name of TABOR (Speech-Based
Interface for Reasoning Systems).
Unfortunately he had to leave for Italy soon after the semester began in connection with his Masters project research so he was not able to attend any of the lab sessions where the group was introduced to the DMC environment. As a result he did not take any further part in our group activities that semester. He had written and published a few articles (in Italian and Norwegian) in relation to his work, but did not wish to submit these since he felt he would not have the time to take further part in the project at this stage.
Tone's academic background was also in lingustics, more specifically in the general area of pragmatics. She had however a varied background, having started her studies at the University of Trondheim in 1992 with the intention of studying political science and social economics, but had changed her mind and started studying Nordic literature and linguistics instead. She had spent a period in Spring 1994 studying at the University of Copenhagen, where she had first found out that she wanted to study linguistics. When she got back to Trondheim again from Copenhagen she had started studying both English literature and linguistics. In 1996 she had apent a period at the University of Antwerp in Belgium as an ERASMUS scholar, also studying linguistics.
When she joined the hypermedia course she was in the process of finishing her course of undergraduate studies in linguistics, and just prior to joining the graduate degree program at the department of linguistics. She was working too, as a student assistent at the same department for students taking the introductory undergraduate course in linguistics.
Tone had a solid theoretical basis in linguistics, or perhaps she would prefer to say pragmatics, and more specifically in Relevance Theory, which she thought would be useful for developing her own perspective on the use of hypermedia in the humanities. She had two pieces of academic writing in Norwegian and one in English which she said she would be willing to submit to me for research purposes, and which we also could use as a basis for some of our discussions on scientific writing in the group.
These were:
Norwegian:
1993: Sammenlignende analyse av et Pär Lagerkvists dikt "Det är vakrest når det skymmer" og Knut Hamsuns dikt "Skjærgaardsøy". [A Comparative analysis of Pär Lagerkvist's poem "Twilight's most beautiful hour" and Knut Hamsun's poem "Skerrie island"]. Examination paper in literary analysis submitted in part fulfillment of NORD 102, Nordic literature, under the Nordic studies undergraduate program.
1994: "TV-Mediets rolle i det nordiske kultursamarbeidet" [The role of the TV medium in Nordic cultural co-operation]. Section 5 in "De nordiske språken och den moderna massemediasituationen" [The Nordic languages and the modern mass media situation]: Group paper submitted in part fulfillment of the seminar: "Nordisk sprogforståelse og kultursamarbejde i massemediesamfunnet" [Nordic understandings of language and cultural co-operation in massmedia society], Copenhagen University, Spring 1994.
English:
1996: "Lexical Processing of Prefixed Words". Review and discussion paper in psycholinguistics, University in Amsterdam, May 1996.
In the last open-ended response section of her questionnaire Tone gave the following account of her own motivations for taking part in the course:
"I chose to take this course because I believe it is relevant in relation to my Masters project, both as a tool and as an academic issue since hypermedia, as I understand it, to a large degree has to do with verbal (textual) communication in new media. I hope to gain insights into how I can make use of this technology, as well as gaining insight into how language behaves in interaction with other forms of communication in hypermedia."
Bjørn was in the second year of a literary science undergraduate degree course. He told us that he was planning to take a course in film and media science at the department of Drama, Film and Theater Science when he was finished with his literary science degree.
He offered to contribute two pieces of academic writing: one which was a paper for a written examination in Literary Science, and another which was a home examination paper in the same discipline which he had written and handed in more or less at the same time.
Bjørn was also active in student politics, and was student
representative for the faculty council for the humanities faculty.
Since the council occasionally held their meetings at times which
collided with the course this meant that he was not able to attend
all our group and lab sessions
Scientific writing:
1995: "Analyse av Platon's Symposion" [An analysis of Platon's Symposion]. Home examination paper in General Literary Science.
1996: "Referentens dekapitasjon" [The decapitation of the referent]. Examination paper in General Literary Science, May 1996.
Sigrun was the youngest and least academically experienced member of the group, being only part of the way through her undergraduate studies. In this connection she was taking another course that same semester in parallell with hypermedia in the humanities. She contributed only one piece of previous academic writing which was an paper submitted for the written examination of a course on religion and alternative life philosophies that she had taken at the department of philosophy.
Sigrun described her own motivations for taking part in the course in her questionnaire response as follows:
"As you will see from my responses, my experience of hypermedia is very limited. One of the reasons why I have chosen to follow this course is precisely to broaden my horizon of experience in this area. Out of curiosity pure and simple. Another reason is that I have previously studied humanities subjects. The title of the course appealed to me and I hope, since AVS 6 is an interdisciplinary course, to manage to see better the relationship between the humanities and more theoretical (technological) disciplines. I am after all, a student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology."
Sigrun contributed the following text:
1995: "Tillitt til håp om mer fornuft, vitenskap, fremskritt?" [Confidence in a hope om more rationality, science and progress?]. Examination paper in Philosophy and Livssyn, December 1995.
Skyer is a DMCE proxy character[12] for a DMCE character at Diversity University named Anatoli, which in its turn belongs to a Russian computer scientist named Anatoli Stoyanovski, who is a member of a distance learning project group at the University of Petrozavodsk in Karelia. We first met Skyer (as Anatoli) at Diversity University, and he later invited us to join him in Karelia MOO, which was just in the process of starting up.
Pargman is the DMCE character name of Daniel, a Swedish researcher who is studying what he refers to as "serious uses" of DMC environments who I became acquainted with some time ago thanks to another colleague from Sweden who put us in touch with one another. We have never met face-to-face, but have exchanged a number of e-mail messages previously and also talked a few times together in Diversity University.
Daniel's Home Page. Om Tema Linköping.
