Anne's History Course

Anne taught a course that used hypertext to examine the stories of a "silent generation" in Japan. Her class used hypertext to break through a cultural avoidance of WWII stories by having students interview their grandparents and relatives for their personal stories to create a hypertext from them. One student interviewed her grandmother, who was reluctant at first, then opened up and shared photos, talked... and talked and talked. She had never in her life had her story asked of her.

even with a web page, people think of each piece as linked linear bits, rather than a network made linear

Why was this project different as a hypertext than as a "conventional" text?

• The multimedia forced multiple voices. (Multimedia vs. hypertext was an issue in our discussion. "What is hypertext?" It's an irritating question but one for which we must have several, contextual, lucid answers.)

• Learning new tools and structure forced new kinds of questions.

• Creating the product as hypertext freed the student not only in structure but in content-- she could create contrasting voices.

The project led to empowerment and voicing so powerful that it could not be overstated. People break out of abusive relationships, discover family stories, discover multiplicity when faced with the inherent multivalence of hypertext. The students' responses to American responses to the WTC attacks.

Students struggled with the difference between a public act (for the web) and a personal one (for the professor) given the personal nature of the assignment. There was tension between commitment and participation in something larger. The public nature of the project, however, also gave the project an authenticity-- the students were involved in a real way in Japan's current discussions over its history in WWII, in building archives of memories. Their engagement in the assignment and the tasks behind it was immediate and (helped by the distance from known rhetorical structures) not defined by ideological authority structures. It was hypertext and it was on the web.

Would it be "selling out" a hypertext to give a "standard" version of a hypertext?