EJournal -- An Electronic Journal

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An Electronic Journal concerned with the
implications of electronic networks and texts.

University at Albany, State University of New York
EJOURNAL@ALBANY.bitnet

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Contents of _EJournal_ back issues:
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To get a back issue, ask to "get" the EJRNL <filename> that you want. To get
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e-mail address : LISTSERV@ALBANY.bitnet
text of message: GET EJRNL V1N1
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Filename: EJRNL.CONTENTS
Contents: This file.

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Filename: EJRNL.INFO
Contents: Information about _EJournal_, including how to obtain back-issues,
how to subscribe, how to submit an article, etc.

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Filename: EJRNL.V1N1
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 1 Number 1

March 1991 - 421 lines.

Principal essay:

"Electronic Journals of Proposed Research"
by Robert K. Lindsay
Mental Health Research Institute
University of Michigan
226 lines.

Abstract:

Scientists and other scholars should use the networks to share ideas before
preparing elaborate grant proposals. Publication in this preliminary form
would attract cooperative peer review, would "register" the concepts involved,
would attract qualified collaboration, and would lead to a smaller number of
futile applications for scarce funds. Notes, Bibliography (TedJ)

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Filename: EJRNL.V1N2
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 1 Number 2

May 1991 - 506 lines.

Principal essay:

"Re/View of _Writing Space_"
by Joe Amato
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
277 lines.

Abstract:

An essay re/view of Jay David Bolter's book, _Writing Space: The Computer,
Hypertext, and the History of Writing_. Joe praises the book, and asks some
questions about the "evangelistic euphoria" with which Bolter greets the
"revolutionary new medium." Post-modernist theorizing, ideological
assumptions, and "the darker side of hypertext" are some issues raised in a
positive review. (TedJ)

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Filename: EJRNL.V1N2-1
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 1 Number 2-1

October 1991 - 426 lines.

Supplemental essays:

"The Brent-Amato Exchange"
by Doug Brent
College of General Studies
University of Calgary
and Joe Amato
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
216 lines.

Abstract:

An exchange between Doug Brent and Joe Amato about the re/view of Bolter's
_Writing Space_, including the requested expansion of "ideas on the 'darker
side' of hypertext." (TedJ)

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Filename: EJRNL.V1N3
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 1 Number 3

November 1991 - 873 lines.

Principal essay:

"Oral Knowledge, Typographic Knowledge, Electronic Knowledge:
Speculations on the History of Ownership"
by Doug Brent
Faculty of General Studies
University of Calgary
686 lines.

Abstract:

The theory of transformative technology (McLuhan, Ong, Heim et al) is applied
to the problem of intellectual property versus communal knowledge. Oral
cultures have no intellectual property: knowledge is communally generated and
shared. Print technology created the book as artifact, knowledge as
individually generated, owned, and protected. Copyright and plagiarism are
inventions of the print age. With CMC and hypertext, we may be returning to an
age in which personal ownership of knowledge becomes virtually impossible by
the nature of the medium itself. This will require profound shifts in our
attitude to knowledge and the way we use its ownership as an incentive to
produce it. (DB)

[ Note: Volume 1 Number 3-1, published in July 1992, is a Supplement to this
issue. It is devoted to an exchange of views between Bob Hering and Doug Brent
about the "power" exerted by technology and by economics. We urge readers of
V1N3 to send for V1N3-1 as well. ]
[ Note: Volume 1 Number 3-2, published in September 1992, is another
supplement to this issue. It contains an essay by John Dilworth arguing that
reputation is as important a reward as money for contributors to electronic
networks. New readers will probably want to look at all three issues. ]
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Filename: EJRNL.V2N1
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 2 Number 1

April 1992 - 351 lines.

** This first issue of our second year is aimed especially at new subscribers **

CONTENTS:
Introduction/Editorial
Summary of Network Commands

**** Please note that a command has changed since this issue was published. GET
INDEX EJRNL is now GET EJRNL CONTENTS; it will supply you with this file.
( this note added 7/20/1992 ) ****

Contents of Volume 1 (1991)
Subjects
Personnel
Ancient History
Other History

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Filename: EJRNL.V2N2
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 2 Number 2

June 1992 - 760 lines

Editorial 1: Should we say goodbye to "text"?
Editorial 2: Writing as reward, not punishment

Principal essay:

"Literacy for the Next Generation: Writing without Handwriting"
by David Coniam
Chinese University of Hong Kong
417 lines

Abstract:

The chore of drawing the alphabet correctly has always been a barrier between
a child's verbal imagination and words on a page. But "good penmanship" --the
requirement to scribble legibly-- need no longer disrupt the flow from composer
to composition. Keyboard-display technology will relegate manuscript writing
to the closet crammed with useful but supplemental knowledge like
multiplication tables and Latin conjugations. More and more children will
associate text-making with pleasure instead of pain. (TedJ)

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Filename: EJRNL.V1N3-1
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 1 Number 3-1

July 1992 - 549 lines

Editorial: Electronic Time Travel

Abstract:

This issue is a Supplement to issue V1N3, devoted to an exchange of views
between Bob Hering and Doug Brent about the "power" exerted by technology and
by economics. We urge readers of V1N3-1 to send for V1N3 as well. (TedJ)

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Filename: EJRNL.V2N3
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 2 Number 3

August, 1992 - 727 lines

Editorial: Call for editors; call for essays; letters to the editor.

Abstract:

This issue contains five responses to David Coniam's essay about children and
keyboards (and to my editorial). One of them was a request to reprint his
piece in the _Journal of Computing in Childhood Education_. One, from Brazil,
was a report of a "test," of sorts, of David's hypothesis. David's essay can
be found in EJRNL.V2N2 . (TedJ)

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Filename: EJRNL.V1N3-2
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 1 Number 3-2

September 1992 - 449 lines

Editorial Notes: List Purging; Money; Reader Survey

Principal essay:

CREDIT, COMPENSATION AND COPYRIGHT:
OWNING KNOWLEDGE AND ELECTRONIC NETWORKS

by John B. Dilworth
Department of Philosophy
Western Michigan University, U.S.A.

Abstract:

This issue is the second Supplement to issue V1N3, an intriguing contribution
to the polylog about who owns electronic texts. Professor Dilworth argues that
the difference between intellectual property and legal property makes copyright
essentialy irrelevant, at least for electronic publications in an academic
context. We urge readers of V1N3-2 to send for V1N3 and V1N3-1 as well. (TedJ)

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Filename: EJRNL.V2N4
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 2 Number 4

December 1992 - 642 lines

Editorial Notes: Surveys

Abstract:

This issue carries a followup exchange on the subject of ownership and
copyright of electronic texts, a thread that started a year ago. Issues V1N3,
V1N3-1 and V1N3-2 contain the original article and followup letters on this
topic. This issue also delivers two questionnaires. One is about electronic
journals and libraries, and one is about you, the reader of _EJournal_.

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Filename: EJRNL.V2N5
Contents: _EJournal_ Volume 2 Number 5

December(2) 1992 - 984 lines

Editorial Notes: Usenet Oracle

Principle Essay:

THE USENET ORACLE:
Virtual Authors and Network Community

by David Sewell
English Department
University of Rochester

Abstract:

David Sewell's essay couldn't come much much closer to _EJournal_'s
announced interests, "the implications of electronic networks and
texts." From a sentence near the end of his text: ". . . the
computer's ability to create self-contained virtual worlds is
beginning to affect what we traditionally call 'writing' or
'literature'. . . ." There's an intriguing observation about
"emergent conventions"; there are plausible hints about ways the
network culture may resemble pre-print communities. (TedJ)

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December(2), 1992 _EJournal_ Volume 2 Number 5 ISSN# 1054-1055
There are 984 lines in this issue.

An Electronic Journal concerned with the
implications of electronic networks and texts.
2787 Subscribers in 38 Countries

University at Albany, State University of New York

EJOURNAL@ALBANY.bitnet

CONTENTS:

Editorial Note [ Begins at line 53 ]

THE USENET ORACLE: [ Begins at line 66 ]
Virtual Authors and Network Community

by David Sewell
English Department
University of Rochester

Information - [ Begins at line 873 ]

About Subscriptions and Back Issues
About Supplements to Previous Texts
About Letters to the Editor
About Reviews
About _EJournal_

People - [ Begins at line 946 ]

Board of Advisors
Consulting Editors

*******************************************************************************
* This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright 1992 by *
* _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away the journal and its *
* contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and all financial interest is hereby*
* assigned to the acknowledged authors of individual texts. This notification*
* must accompany all distribution of _EJournal_. *
*******************************************************************************

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Editorial Note -

David Sewell's essay couldn't come much much closer to _EJournal_'s
announced interests, "the implications of electronic networks and
texts." From a sentence near the end of his text: ". . . the
computer's ability to create self-contained virtual worlds is
beginning to affect what we traditionally call 'writing' or
'literature'. . . ." There's an intriguing observation about
"emergent conventions"; there are plausible hints about ways the
network culture may resemble pre-print communities.

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THE USENET ORACLE:
Virtual Authors and Network Community

by David Sewell
English Department
University of Rochester
dsew@troi.cc.rochester.EDU

1. What Happens to Authors in Cyberspace?

Many literary theorists who have addressed the phenomenon of
"electronic writing" -- a catch-all category that includes word
processing, hypertext, and all communication on wide-area networks --
argue that its immateriality as a medium calls into question the
notional status of authors who publish using it. For some,
digitized writing is the technology finally responsible for the
"death of the author" that Roland Barthes proclaimed two decades ago
("Death of the Author"), a "death" that has been a tenet of
poststructural thought ever since. Their basic argument
runs something like this: The traditional view of an "author" as a
single autonomous agent, the sole intentional creator of a work, is a
product of the age of the codex book, when writing was both material
and unalterable. But the electronic medium, in Jay Bolter's words,
"denies the fixity of the text, and . . . questions the authority of
the author" (_Writing Space_ 153). When written words are stored as
electronic bits in memory, they are not objects to be owned. When
authors are incarnated as electronic texts that can be erased,
annotated, downloaded, linked, and redistributed, they are
"textualized"; at that point their identities merge into a communal
hypertext or discussion thread. Although he wasn't speaking of
computers, Barthes had already hinted in that direction by writing
that "the metaphor of the Text is that of the _network_ ("Death" 161).
Peggy Kamuf finds confirmation of Barthes's formula in the "general
incapacity of a conceptual framework to support or contain the author
function disseminated by computer-aided modeling and composition,
video reproduction, hypertext data banks, nanotechnology, and so
forth" (_Signature Pieces_ 16). Perhaps, as Mark Poster suggests, an
electronic newsgroup or conference "becomes a single text without an
author in the traditional sense of the term" (_Mode of Information_
122). [line 105]

Curiously, though, electronic communication has tended to hang on
tenaciously to the single, identifiable author: on-line journals have
conventional tables of contents and author attributions, nearly all
e-mail and news-posting systems identify message senders, and on
networks like Usenet the elaborate ".sig" or signature appended to
one's postings has become a way of transcending the uniformity of the
medium. (A ".sig" is a signature file automatically appended to
postings by news software; Usenet posters fill them not only with
their name, business or academic affiliation, and e-mail, telephone,
and fax information, but also with ".sig quotes" or epigrams, and even
fancy ASCII graphics.)

Despite the network's potential to allow anonymous collaboration,
it is rare for even experimental network art and participatory
projects to be anonymous. For years there have existed on BBS's and
conference systems so-called "storyboards" or "never-ending stories,"
where one person begins a narrative line, and others are free to
develop the plot and add characters within the constraints of
agreed-upon conventions. (The Usenet group alt.callahans is entirely
devoted to communal fiction of this sort, for instance.) Since in
most cases contributions to these multiply-authored texts are sent as
regular e-mail or news postings, they are identified, sometimes
intrusively, as the products of specific authors. Such was the case
with "Les Immateriaux," an experimental e-mail project on which
twenty-six French intellectuals collaborated in 1984 as part of an
exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Participant Jacques
Derrida observed that while the computer erases the author's voice,
each contribution was nevertheless signed and therefore "owned" in the
traditional way, making the experiment less radical than the
technology allowed. (See Poster 114-115.) Even where an editor
intervenes to eliminate tags associating a given author with a portion
of the completed text, contributors are typically identified or
acknowledged by name. For example, in the collaborative fiction
"Thirty Minutes in the Late Afternoon" created and published on the
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) in 1990, editor Judy Malloy
rearranged posted contributions to create a seamless narrative in
parallel columns, but used parenthetical numbers linked to author
names to identify the individual contributions.^1^ When claims are
made, then, that the electronic medium inherently tends to assimilate
the solitary author to a network or collaborative group, they need to
be tested critically against the actual practice of writers on the
nets.
[line 149]
2. The Usenet Oracle: Description and Background

Yet there are forms of on-line writing which, if taken seriously *as*
writing, challenge traditional definitions of authorship because both
collaboration and anonymity are enabled or even required by their
design. One widely-used example is a real-time conferencing program
like the Daedalus Group's "Interchange," which allows pseudonymous
login; many writing teachers find that letting students write as
make-believe characters can free them to explore a range of voices and
attitudes that signed writing might have made threatening. Another
example is the Usenet Oracle, in which I have been a
participant-observer -- as both anonymous author and named editor --
for some months now. It is one of the most prominent experiments in
collaborative creation, an automated mail server that allows two
people, a questioner and a respondent, to create a text without
knowing one another's identity.

Interestingly, the form of anonymous question-and-respose turns out to
be less postmodern in approach than one might expect. It reflects
perhaps not so much a postmodern as a premodern approach to
authorship, like that of Shakespeare's day, when literature

was a by-product of learning or study, which presupposed
leisure. The gentleman might take pride in his by-product, but
he considered it as only one of many accomplishments in an
active life. He never wrote for money, never put his name on
what he wrote, and rarely even condescended to put what he wrote
in print. His work was addressed to a small group of equals.
(Charvat, _Profession_ 6-7)

The technical basis of the Usenet Oracle is a software program
developed and installed by Steve Kinzler (with assistance from Ray
Moody) on a computer at Indiana University. Although based on earlier
programs that ran on local systems, the Usenet Oracle was the first to
allow any person with e-mail access to the Internet to participate.
The concept is simple. A questioner, or "Supplicant," e-mails a
question to the Oracle. The Oracle software puts the question at the
end of a "question queue"; when its turn comes, it will be mailed to
someone else who has submitted a question. That person now becomes an
"Incarnation" of the Oracle and must e-mail a response to the question
back to the Oracle's address. Finally, the Oracle combines question
and answer and mails the completed "Oracularity" to the Supplicant
while saving a copy for itself. Because the software encodes all
names and addresses, neither questioner nor respondent know one
another's identities.
[line 195]
[For a help file explaining how to participate in the Oracle, along
with a brief history of the program, send e-mail with the subject
"help" to oracle@cs.indiana.edu.]

In its most basic form, then, the Oracle software essentially
automates a party game where a central organizer gathers questions on
slips of paper, makes sure that the questioner is not given his or her
own submission, and distributes them to be answered. In its early
days as a local Indiana University program Oracle was not much more
sophisticated than that, its one-line questions and brief answers
ranging from witty to flippant:

The oracle has pondered your question deeply.
Your question was:

> Why is a cow?

And in response, thus spake the oracle:

} Mu.

You owe the oracle 2 big kisses. [000-42] ^2^

["Mu" is the Zen master's traditional response to an unanswerable
question. Questions to the Oracle are always quoted with the ">"
character, responses with "}". The original Oracle software
automatically appended a randomly-chosen "payment" line to the
response; the Usenet version does not, but asking the questioner or
"supplicant" for some appropriate payment has become a convention.]

Beginning in October, 1989, when Kinzler publicized the Oracle's
existence on a number of Usenet news groups and began posting
selections of the best Oracularities to the widely-read rec.humor
group, questions and responses became increasingly creative and
elaborate, and over the three years of its existence the Oracle has
grown far beyond its origins into a genre with its own conventions,
formulas, and mythos. The Oracle now has its own Usenet newsgroup,
rec.humor.oracle, with current estimated worldwide readership of about
25,000; another 600 subscribers receive digests of Oracularities via
an e-mail list ^3^.

Two or three digests of ten Oracularities are published most weeks;
less than ten percent of all submissions are selected for
publication. Beginning with the 100th digest a voting system was
introduced so readers could rate Oracularities; every few months the
highest-rated ones are collected into a special "best of" collection.
After he had read and edited some 20,000 submissions during
the Usenet Oracle's first year of existence, Kinzler established a
"Priesthood" of volunteer editors--currently about two dozen--who
filter incoming Oracularities and pass along the best ones.
[line 246]
Not surprisingly, many of the published Oracularities involve
computers: parodies of Unix documentation; jibes at Microsoft, DEC,
and other companies; elaborate text-adventure games; sessions where
the Oracle logs onto a mainframe at "heaven.com" or onto someone's
brain (various parts of the psyche are typically represented as files
in a user's home directory); satire aimed at the hated VMS operating
system (for instance, a clever comparison between VMS and PMS, which
"have pretty much the same features, as anyone familiar with both
could tell you" [310-10]). But many other species of Oracularities
have evolved: parodies of everything from sociological jargon through
pop-cult TV shows to Sam Spade mysteries and 18th-century bawdy drama;
humorous and nonsense verse; mock-scientific explanations of obscure
phenomena; manic invented histories and science-fiction scenarios. In
one of the highest-rated Oracularities [135-08], the Oracle runs a
simulation program that pits Merlin against Stephen Hawking in order
to determine whether magic is real. (Hawking wins when Merlin violates
causality by invoking a future self who accidentally kills his earlier
self.) The best-received Oracularities are ingenious comic
miniatures, often products of considerable effort and imagination. In
the following Oracularity, quoted in full, the question sets up an old
punch line: "Make me one with everything!" The respondent, however,
makes it an occasion for an extended comic monologue:

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply.
Your question was:

> What did the Tibetian [sic] monk say to the hot dog vendor?

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

} The most famous exchange between a lama and a hot dog vendor
} occurred one block south of Times Square in July 1988.
}
} Hot Dog Vendor: What can I get for ya today? Footlong with
} the works? I said, what can I get for ya today? Hey, ya
} wanna hot dog or not? Listen if yer not going to order willya
} move on, I gotta business to run. Stop starin' at me, man.
} And wipe that silly grin off yer face. Say something, dammit, [line 284]
} yer givin' me the creeps. Hey, I get it. Ya don't [speak]
} English, do ya? Uh, lessee, yo, uh, tengo los, uh, hot dogs,
} uh, perros calientes. Okay, fine! just stand there. See if I
} care. Just don't scare away the customers. Jeez. Forget it.
} Ya wanna Coke? Coca-cola? I don't care where yer from, ya
} gotta understand "Coca-cola". Coca-cola? Stop smiling.
} People'll think yer up to something. Hey, I got all-beefs,
} beef-n-porks, turkey dogs, polish sausage, and kielbasa. You
} can get ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, relish, pickles, or
} onions on them. I've got plain and whole grain buns. I don't
} care what you want, just order something or leave. I'm
} serious, man, if you don't go away, I'll call the cops and
} have them arrest you for loitering. Jesus Christ, will you
} stop staring at me! STOP IT! At least blink once in a while.
} You're driving me crazy! You wanna Coke? Wait, no, I already
} tried that. Listen, man, I'm serious, stop starin' and grin-
} nin' at me. I gotta gun under the counter. I'll use it. I
} mean it. STOP STARING AT ME! STOP IT! STOP IT! STOPIT-
} STOPITSTOPIT! YOU'RE DRIVING ME CRAZY! AAAAARGH! STOPIT-
} STOPITSTOPITSTOPIT! PLEASE LOOK AWAY! HERE! OKAY! I'M
} MAKING YOU A HOT DOG FOR FREE! TAKE IT! EAT IT! JUST GO
} AWAY! STOPITSTOPITSTOPITSTOPIT! YOU WANNA COKE? OKAY!
} HERE'S A COKE! IT'S ON THE HOUSE! NOW PLEASE GO AWAY!
} I CAN'T TAKE ANY MORE OF THIS! YOUR EYES ARE DRIVING ME
} INSANE! PLEASE STOPITSTOPISTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP!
}
} Then the lama widened his grin just enough to barely show
} his teeth. At that moment the hot dog vendor was enlightened.
}
} You owe the Oracle a better koan. And a new deli.
[293-03; formatting of the original text has been modified]

If this is taken as a representative Oracularity, its most striking
features might seem to have nothing to do with "electronic writing."
Generically, the response is a dramatic monologue framed as a Zen koan
or teaching story. It uses dialect and concrete detail admirably, but
no differently than any creative writer would. Even the arbitrariness
of the question which the respondent must answer could be mirrored in
a traditional writing situation: one can readily imagine a creative
writing instructor asking students to compose a scene between a
hot-dog vendor and a Tibetan monk as a warm-up class exercise. In
fact writing an Oracle response has a good deal in common with
impromptu narrative and improvisational drama, two forms that require
inventive response to an unforeseen assignment.
[line 329]
3. Features Unique to Online Collaboration

Other aspects of the Oracle as a writing situation are unique to its
medium. Most importantly, questioner and respondent are invisible and
unknown to each other. They share neither a physical location nor a
common time of writing. Both writers must guess at the likely range
of cultural references, terminology, and specific knowledge that their
co-authors share. (The Oracle's help file alludes to this problem in
its suggestion that writers avoid "slang, jargon, and obscure
references," since "[p]eople of all different backgrounds located all
over the world use the Oracle.") In the quoted Oracularity, the
respondent assumes that readers will understand the humor of the
confrontation between New York vernacular culture and Tibetan
Buddhism, and that they will catch allusions to the "beatific smile"
and the teaching style of Zen (the smiling monk of course plays
_roshi_ to the befuddled vendor-novice who is finally enlightened).
Mark Poster claims that every author-audience relationship in
electronic writing is to some extent a fiction:

[I]ndividuals engage in telecommunications with other
individuals . . . without considerations that derive from the
presence to the partner of their body, their voice, their sex,
many of the markings of their personal history. [They] are in
the position of fiction writers who compose themselves as
characters in the process of writing. . . . The traces of their
embeddedness in culture are restricted to the fact that they are
competent to write in a particular language, writing perhaps at
the infinite degree. (Poster, _Mode of Information_ 117)

But Poster exaggerates the degree of uncertainty about audience that
electronic networks create. Our respondent's assumption that readers
would catch the Zen references was not arbitrary. As a discourse
community, Usenet has its historical roots in hacker subculture, one
of whose best-known features is a predilection for Zen-like paradox;
before the Oracularity of the Tibetan monk appeared, there had been many
published Oracularities reflecting this interest. (The frequent
references to Zen in Douglas Hofstadter's _Goedel, Escher, Bach_
[1979] merely brought to the attention of the wider public an interest
that had been part of hacker culture for years. See, for example, the
"AI Koans" in Appendix A of Eric Raymond's _The New Hacker's
Dictionary_, pp. 404-405.) Even though Usenet readers are growing far
more varied in background as wide-area network use mushrooms, the
Net's discourse conventions derive from hacker subculture as surely as
the prescriptions of traditional high-school English classes are
rooted in neoclassical grammar.
[line 375]
Why does such a talented comic writer as the Master of the Hot Dog
Koan choose not to identify himself or herself to gain what we usually
consider a major reward of authorship -- recognition? While the Oracle
software makes anonymity possible by withholding participants' names
and e-mail addresses, the complete anonymity of published
Oracularities is actually a matter of convention and authorial choice.
In the introductory Oracle help file, participants are explicitly
told, "If you do not wish to remain anonymous, you may include a
phrase in your answer like "incarnated as <insert your name and/or
address here>." Nevertheless, fewer than one percent of authors
choose to do so. This was one of the first things about the Oracle
that intrigued me: writers like the Master of the Hot Dog Koan were
evidently putting real effort into writing that went "unrewarded" by
the conventional association of name with publication.

4. Why are Usenet Oracle authors content to remain anonymous?

In August, 1992, I conducted a survey of Oracle participants to seek
answers to this and other questions about the Oracle, receiving via
e-mail 125 returned questionnaires. Of the 80 active authors who
answered the question "How do you feel about the anonymity of
Oracularities?" 59 (79%) felt it was helpful or crucial, while only 5
(7%) said they would prefer to be identified. Narrative responses to
the question indicate that anonymity provides two crucial advantages:
freedom of self-expression, and the shared aesthetic illusion of an
Oracle persona. Like college professors who publish murder mysteries
or romance novels under pseudonyms for fear of being thought
unprofessional, Oracle writers sometimes feel safer when unidentified:

I think [anonymity is] essential. I wouldn't have the guts to
use the Oracle if I knew my name was going with everything I
wrote.

It helps me to give answers which are much more uninhibited. If
I knew my identity would be made public I might be a little
reluctant to write, since I would not want co-workers to know
how much I am involved.
[line 413]
But the second reason for accepting anonymity more resembles that of
the medieval author, who, in Hans Robert Jauss's words, wrote "in
order to praise and to extend his object, not to express himself or to
enhance his personal reputation" (Ede and Lunsford, _Singular Texts_
78). The "object" in this case is the collection of a corpus of work
by a personality, the Oracle, whose characteristics derive from the
collective efforts of contributors. (The Oracle help file
acknowledges "the thousands of Oracle participants over the years who
have created the personality, mythos and history of the Usenet
Oracle.") And in fact the Oracle has accreted an identifiable
personality. Like a Greek god, he is polymorphous: now a crotchety
old man, now a super-intelligent computer program, now a deity. A
jealous, omniscient and omnipotent being, he is apt to strike with
lightning (or "<ZOT>") supplicants who insult him or fail to grovel
sufficiently. Nevertheless he is vulnerable to having his plug pulled
by his creator Kinzler, his computer's system administrator, or an
irate "god@heaven.com." Like Zeus, he has a consort: Lisa evolved
from the cliche-geek's fantasy-fulfilling "net.sex.goddess" to the
Oracle's companion. It may be that one reason for leaving Oracle
submissions unsigned is generic constraint: like Scripture,
Oracularities should seem to participants to proceed directly from the
voice of God. As E. M. Forster once observed of unsigned newspaper
editorials, "anonymous statements have . . . a universal air about
them. Absolute truth, the collected wisdom of the universe, seems to
be speaking, not the feeble voice of a man" (_Anonymity_ 8). A number
of Oracle authors who responded to the questionnaire identified
similar reasons for leaving their contributions unsigned:

I'd put less effort into writing for the Oracle if [my identity]
were public. I prefer the idea of an all-powerful Oracle rather
than the various incarnations scenario. . . . Sometimes it
would be nice to say, "I wrote that!" but I prefer to just smile
knowingly...

I don't care who wrote it, but it sort of loses something when I
see a signature line. Destroys the myth, so to speak.

When I read Oracularities . . . I prefer to think of a faceless
deity in a cave somewhere, not joe@lharc.netcom.edu. I prefer
anonymity.
[line 454]
So one of the most powerful conventions governing Oracle responses is the
attempt to give voice to the Oracle's persona, a wise but world-weary and
sometimes petty deity for whom answering queries is just a 9-to-5 job:

} Day in, day out, the Oracle hears the cries of despair and
} ennui that rise from people like you, trapped in an absurd
} human condition. "What does it all mean?" you want to know.

} Time was, a younger and more energetic Oracle tried to answer
} every existential query individually. But Usenet has grown
} apace, and let's face it, "What is reality?" is FAQ number 1.
[i.e. "Frequently Asked Question"; 453-03]

The willingness of Oracle authors to experiment with different voices
and personae mirrors something Trent Batson has noticed about
network-based writing classrooms: they seem almost "meant for
simulation" (Batson, "ENFI" 4) -- that is, for playing with roles,
scenarios, and invented characters. Participants seem to agree that
the Oracle is in a small way a verbal world constructed by the
community. Good Oracularities, one questionnaire respondent wrote,
"are necessarily creative and humorous, but I think the very best ones
display a sort of *attitude* that the Oracle has. This is hard to
define. It's sort of an agreed-upon personality that the collective
mind has." Another respondent observed that Usenet in general is "an
artifice by which digitheads like ourselves can communicate with each
other - it's a really crude precursor to cyberspace, and is a lot of
fun. But it's definitely a simulation."

5. The Oracle and Textual Authority

Because Oracle writing is fluid, improvisatory, and infinitely variable, it
tends especially to mock forms of discourse, from computer documentation to
scripture, that are formulaic and authoritative at the same time. In Bakhtin's
terms Oracularities are thoroughly "heteroglossic," composed of pastiche,
parody, fantasy, imitated voices, conventional genres, comic dialogues. If the
traditional model of authorship is what Barthes calls the "Author-God" ("Death
of the Author" 146), the Oracle undermines it at every opportunity. Parodies
of the Bible abound. There is a "Very Strange Version" [391-08], and a
marvelously blasphemous version of Biblical history in which (among other
things) Jesus is sent to earth to warn man not to ask the Oracle the Woodchuck
Question [460-05], and even a dialogue where the Oracle uses a synchronous
"talk" program to summon God on behalf of a supplicant:
[line 497]
} Somebody wants to talk to you, God.
}
} >Yes? Can't you just give them my Internet address?
}
} Sure would like to, God. But you see, in the context of an Oracular
} message you've degenerated from a halfhearted joke into an
} irrepressively [sic] boring formulaic answer.
}
} >What is this? What are you saying?
}
} God, you're dead. Not because of that asshole Nietzsche, not because
} you're old, not because you hang out at the terminal room on Saturday
} nights. You're dead because you are invoked for answering questions
} like "How much would does a wood chuck chuck if a woodchuck could
} chuck wood?" and "Is Lisa good in bed?" You're such a stiff. [155-05]

(This dialogue ends when the Oracle deletes his "God" program,
casually noting that "God is simply a mathematical construct of mine
that I use to amuse myself during spare clock cycles.") Of course,
the Oracle's own textual authority is no less vulnerable. If he is an
AI program or a computer, he can be undone by system errors, infinite
loops, and line noise. (In one Oracularity, the Oracle is on trial
for dereliction of duty. Called to the witness stand, "Kinzler" is
asked if he knows the defendant. "Yes I do. He's an executable file
in my home directory" [238-10].) As a deity, he is beset by Homeric
squabbles with other gods and by his own arrogance. As a human male,
he is often bested by Lisa in an ongoing battle of the sexes, or held
up to ridicule for his thoroughgoing paternalism.

Always, however, the Oracle is a product of writing, and his status as
text is often underlined by metafictional play with the Oracle
conventions or, more generally, with narrative and language
themselves. Asked which types of Oracularities they preferred,
respondents to my questionnaire chose as their favorite genre
"meta-Oracularities (self-referential plays on Oracle conventions)."
Given the preponderance of participants with strong computer
backgrounds (78% are, or are preparing to be, "computer
professionals"), this is not surprising: of the six distinctive
characteristics of "hacker humor" identified by Eric Raymond, the
first is "fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and
humor having to do with confusion of metalevels" (_New Hacker's
Dictionary_ 203) ^4^. Some of the best Oracularities play with
surrealistic and metafictional frame-breaking in the best tradition of
Italo Calvino and John Barth. For instance, in one of readers'
all-time favorites, the Oracle is asked who would win a fight between
Superman and the Hulk. Finding the question too trivial for his august
consideration, the Oracle runs a simulation program on the Vax in
search of an answer. Sim-Hulk and Sim-Superman batter each other
until the Hulk, about to lose, decides to smash out of the simulation,
whereupon he and Superman begin showing up on users' terminals all
over Indiana University, and "Kinzler" receives an electronic message
from an irate administrator: "Stephen, what is that goddamned Oracle
of yours up to now? We have memory faults all over the place, iuvax
is threatening to 'smash puny workstations' and this errant process is
invading every die green behemoth! You see what I mean? Knock it off!
Smash!" [140-05]. Another Oracularity is an extended self-referential
tour-de-force along the lines of Barth's "Life Story"; if anything it
is more effective in showing narrative giving birth to itself since no
identifiable author stands behind the prose:
[line 557]
The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply.
Your question was:

> This is the first sentence of my question, which wants the Oracle to
> know that all the sentences of my question grovel humbly before the
> Awesome presence. . . .
>
> Boldly reclaiming the path, this sentence starts out a new and improved
> paragraph. This sentence is confident we will finally get to the
> point, since it can see the next sentence will, indeed, ask the
> question. This sentence wants to know if there is anything profound in
> self-reference. . . .

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

} This is the first sentence of the Oracle's response. This is the
} second sentence of that response. This sentence appears several times.
[. . .]
}
} This is actually the third sentence of the first paragraph but has been
} placed here in error. This sentence appears several times. This
} sentence attempts to abandon the self-referential style so that your
} question may be answered, but fails. This sentence makes the same
} attempt, but fails just as miserably. This sentence appears several
} times. This sentence, though not able to abandon self-reference,
} nonetheless succeeds in tackling your question in that it postulates
} that while the selfreferential style may seem horribly vague and boring,
} it *does* give ample opportunity for playfulness on the part of the
} author.

6. The Oracle and the Network Community

The preceding Oracularity is somewhat anomalous in the thorough
undermining of authorial presence it borrows from the "high-culture"
experimental literature it imitates. Ordinarily, techniques like
self-referentiality and frame-breaking in the Oracularities differ
subtly from their analogues in literary metafiction. In the latter,
they serve to efface the concrete social reality of the author by
providing the illusion that the text writes itself. The "author" of
literary metafiction is presumed to be the sheer intertextual
conjunction of other books, or perhaps an arbitrary language game,
like the combinatory that generates the books in Borges' Library of
Babel. By claiming origin in pure formal systems, metafiction denies
that it is a product of a given society, let alone of an individual
author.
[line 603]
However, the Oracle's obsession with logic games, paradox, and
infinite regress mark its collective author as a member of a
distinctive and identifiable subculture, that of the hacker. Where
literary metafiction can be -- perhaps most often is -- apolitical,
the Oracle's very existence on the Net is an implicit endorsement of
hacker politics: information (both data and text) should flow freely;
authority over information systems should be decentralized; the
aesthetics of programming (or any other creation; a poem can be a
"good hack") is more important than the material uses to which it may
be put. Jim Cheetham, one of the Oracle Priests, finds awareness of
"hacker culture" important to Oracle participants "because I think
it's a good and correct outlook to try to educate 'net users into,"
especially since the Oracle "has a (slightly) moderated version of the
'net's government by anarchy" (personal communication). The core
characteristic of Net governance is that conventions and rules emerge
from community practice and consensus rather than being imposed from
the top.

In many ways the development of Oracle conventions (like those of
Usenet writing in general) resembles the evolution of epic in an oral
culture: any individual participant is free to alter, supplement, or
redirect the narrative, but only those innovations that are accepted
by the community survive ^5^. Fascination with recursion is, one might
say, sociologically grounded in the Oracle community, as reflected in
a wickedly clever Oracular response to the question, "Why don't
computer scientists have any sexual stamina?": "Their problem is a
fear that any repetitive process is actually the dreaded infinite
loop. Providing a proof that the usual termination condition will
still occur should suffice" [089-10]. Roger Noe, a computer scientist
and Oracular Priest, believes the Oracle's persona reflects "self-
satire at its best":

[W]e're really making fun of ourselves, the users of computers,
and the designers and implementers of computer hardware and
software, which is not necessarily distinct from the group of
users. . . . [M]uch of the Oracle mythology is simply a satire
of the stereotypical computer nerd. He's a know-it-all who
holes up in his sanctum sanctorum, surrounded by every kind of
computer hardware and software imaginable, connected to every
network that might exist (including olympus-net, god-net,
cthulhu-net, you name it) and continuously engaged in multiple
simultaneous conversations from people obsequiously seeking his
knowledge. (Personal communication) ^6^
[line 647]
In identifying self-satire as a generic motive, Noe helps explain why
most Oracularities are *not* couched in terms that only a computer
scientist or electrical engineer can understand. A few Oracularities
have in fact been written entirely in C programming code (inevitably
beginning with the header "#include <stdgrovel.h>"--i.e., an imaginary
standard library grovel file), and others that elaborate the syntax of
a context-free grammar for Oracle questions and answers, but a heavy
concentration of these generally provokes irritation from Oracle
participants. As one respondent to my questionnaire, an engineer, put
it, "I HATE (!!!!) Oracularities which rely on some intensive
knowledge and familiarity with computers, operating systems and
languages - computer nerd 'humour' of this sort is pathetic." This
even though Oracle authors tend to imagine their audience as composed
precisely of computer nerds; as one participant described it, "a room
full of sophomore and junior undergraduate computer science geeks with
x-rated gifs on their xterms, speaking technobabble to each other, and
nary a one of them has had a date or a bath for a month." (As a matter
of fact, the average age of Oracle readers turns out to be a
comparatively elderly 26.) One motive for not writing technobabble,
then, might be to satirize those who can write nothing else. (In his
entry on "Hacker Speech Style," Raymond says, "One should use just
enough jargon to communicate precisely and identify oneself as a
member of the culture; overuse of jargon . . . is considered tacky and
the mark of a loser" [_New Hacker's Dictionary_ 20].)

The members of the Oracle Priesthood who answered my questionnaire
agreed that a broad cultural knowledge is important to give competent
responses to questions. Here is how they rated a number of categories
of knowledge on a scale from 1="not important" to 5="very important":

Classical (Greek & Roman) mythology: 3.5
Classic English and American literature: 3.4
Illuminati, Tolkien, other cult literature: 3.4
Current world affairs: 3.3
American popular culture/politics: 3.2
Geography and history: 3.1
Hacker culture and lore: 3.1
Oracle mythos (Lisa, ZOTting, etc.): 3.0
Natural and biological sciences: 2.8
Unix operating system: 2.8
C programming: 2.6
Movies: 2.6
Other computer systems (VMS, DOS, etc): 2.5
[line 691]
There is a clear continuum here from literature down through current
affairs and history to formal and scientific systems. These responses
suggest a catholicity, a desire to open the network subculture up to
any form of culture it can incorporate. To the extent that it is a
hacker phenomenon, the Oracle is the vehicle of a discourse community
that is actively assimilating older modes of thought and writing
rather than turning inward. So it is no surprise to find, for example,
an updated version of the old Davy Crockett backwoods boast:

> I am a Unix Guru: I debug programs from octal dumps.
> I eat VMS hackers for lunch.
> I know the entire Ada manual by rote, never use Ada anyway since I write
> all my programs in machine language and never use assemblers since I
> type in the binaries directly using cat. [a Unix program that displays
output]
[. . .]
> I write device drivers in my sleep.
> The DEC salespeople worship me as a minor deity and sacrifice young,
> buxom secretaries to me at full moon. [141-10]

It wouldn't be too far off, in fact, to call Davy Crockett a nineteenth-
century version of the Oracle. The jests, tall tales, and embroidered
history published in the popular Davy Crockett almanacs were anonymous
vehicles for solidifying the folk culture of the frontier, as the
Oracle is for the electronic frontier. The Oracle differs chiefly in
its inclusiveness: the electronic frontier is a circle whose
circumference is nowhere, and in principal anyone with network access
can join the community. Consider the Swedish participant who reported
that he appreciates the Oracle because it allowed him to have "a
fruitful cooperation with a total stranger, which other people (also
strangers) have liked so much as to put [the result] in the
oracularities." The evidence is that writing for a virtual community
like the Usenet Oracle's can be its own reward. "It's wonderful,"
another participant wrote; "there is an immediate reward in the form
of your own question being answered. And if your answer is good,
immediate reward by publication."
[line 728]
The existence of the Usenet Oracle by itself is hardly enough to
herald the "death of the author," especially when so much
electronic writing still takes traditional forms. Nor does working with
computers diminish individualism simply because networks constitute a
kind of communal reality or because programming emphasizes formal
systems rather than subjective expression; Eric Raymond notes that in
its anonymity "the Oracle is atypical. Most hacker-community projects
are undertaken as ego expression, a way to earn the respect and
approval of peers" (Personal communication). And the same can be said
of most non-hackers who publish on the Net. But the energy and
creativity that writers put into their Oracle participation is one
among several pieces of evidence that the computer's ability to create
self-contained virtual worlds is beginning to affect what we
traditionally call "writing" or "literature" as distinct from "mere"
game.

Just as the players in 3-D interactive adventure games of the future
will "become" knights, hobbits, or New York cabbies, virtual writers
in interactive network spaces take on new identities in a universe of
discourse where their supposedly "real" selves may never be known, and
where even their simulated identities may not be fixed. The Net may
yet turn out to be that culture imagined by Michel Foucault "where
discourse would circulate without any need for an author . . . [and]
would unfold in a pervasive anonymity" ("What Is an Author," 138). In
such a culture writers may lose the rewards of traditional authorship,
while gaining the satisfaction of helping to create art forms and
genres that could not have existed otherwise. As one of the
questionnaire respondents wrote, "Oracularities are designed for the
medium in which they are read--I can't imagine it working on anything
but Usenet." It remains to be seen whether such innovative forms will
become, figuratively, the cathedrals of cyberspace that countless
unacknowledged builders and designers will collaborate on for the sake
of creation itself.

(Special thanks to Steve Kinzler and all the Oracular Priests and
participants who corresponded with me as I was doing research for this
article.)
[line 767]

NOTES

(^1^) "Thirty Minutes" was published in the online journal ART COM, Number 42
(October 1990); for information on obtaining back issues send e-mail to
artcomtv@well.sf.ca.us.

(^2^) All Oracularities quoted in this article were originally published in
on-line digests; the first number refers to the digest volume, while the
second is individual Oracularity. The Oracle help file referred to above
includes information on retrieving back digests.

(^3^) The readership figure derives from Brian Reid's period estimations of
Usenet group readership posted to the newsgroup news.lists.

(^4^) The others are "Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual
constructs"; "Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre,
ludicrous, or just grossly counter-intuitive premises"; "Fascination with
puns and wordplay"; "A fondness for apparently mindless humor with subversive
currents of intelligence in it" (Marx Bros., Monty Python); and "References
to the symbol-object antinomies and associated ideas in Zen Buddhism and
(less often) Taoism" (203-204). All of these are common in the
Oracularities.

(^5^) Asked how Oracle conventions developed, Steve Kinzler replied,
"emergently. Someone tries something in an Oracle question or answer, it
gets published in the Oracularities, everyone else reads it, catches on and
starts using it themselves. The durable ones stick, the weak ones fade away"
(personal communication).

(^6^) Another of the highest-rated Oracularities manages to interpret Creation
in hackish terms at the same time that it satirizes the stereotyped male
hacker:

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply.
Your question was:

> Why is it that most men suffer a complete loss [o]f personality when
> exposed in any manner to a computer?
[line 807]
And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

} In order to explain this I must detail the story of creation...
}
} In the beginning there was a Computer. And God said to the computer
} % vi creation.c
} He then wrote the universe, and compiled it and it was good.
} And God ran it in background, and saw that it was good. He
} then noticed that the Universe was eating CPU time and tried
} to kill it, so that he could do his important work, which
} was to determine the Ultimate Question of Life the Universe
} and Everything. The Operating System had a glitch and the
} Universe could not be kill -9'd.
}
} It came to pass that a lady friend of His wanted to visit
} with Him. He snarled at her for the interruption. Then Man,
} being made in His image, forever duplicated this when being
} interrupted by women while he was working on a computer.
}
} That is why men react poorly when being interrupted on the
} computer. It is a Divine trait.
}
} You owe the Oracle the source code for the Universe. [175-10]

REFERENCES

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." In _Image, Music, Text_.
Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Batson, Trent. "ENFI and Drama." _EnfiLOG_ 1.1 (1992).

Bolter, Jay David. _Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History
of Writing_. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.

Charvat, William. _The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870_.
Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1968.
[line 845]
Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. _Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives
on Collaborative Writing_. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.

Forster, E. M. _Anonymity: An Enquiry_. London: Hogarth, 1925.

Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" In _Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews_. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans.
Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

Kamuf, Peggy. _Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship_. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1988.

Poster, Mark. _The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social
Context_. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.

Raymond, Eric S., ed. _The New Hacker's Dictionary_. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
P, 1991.

David Sewell English Department dsew@troi.cc.rochester.edu
University of Rochester

[ This essay in Volume 2 Number 5 of _EJournal_ (December (2), 1992) is
(c) copyright _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give it away.
_EJournal_ hereby assigns any and all financial interest to David Sewell.
This note must accompany all copies of this text. ]

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An Electronic Journal concerned with the

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Department of Philosophy Dept. of Information and Computer Science

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*******************************************************************************

* _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away the journal and its *

* contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and all financial interest is hereby*

* assigned to the acknowledged authors of individual texts. This notification*

* must accompany all distribution of _EJournal_. *

*******************************************************************************

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Editorial Notes [line 58]

This issue carries a followup exchange on the subject of ownership

and copyright of electronic texts, a thread that started a year ago.

It also delivers two questionnaires. One is about electronic

journals and libraries, and one is about you.

Please respond to both of them.

They are not audience surveys to help us make promises to

advertisers. They have to do with our sliver of what the networks

are-- or can be --all about.

If all 2787 of you decide not to respond to the first one, about

libraries and how they ought to treat the fledgling phenomenon of

electronic journals, librarians might find it easy to ignore us.

No matter what reputation _EJournal_ and other experiments build

for ourselves inside cyberspace, we'll all remain merely virtual if

librarians decide we're too much trouble to share with

non-subscribers.

That first questionnaire consists of 22 items designed by an

Information Science investigator; they can be responded to easily with

an "extraction" maneuver and e-mailed to Meta Reid at an RPI address,

or they can be printed out and penciled in and sent via fax or snail

mail.

The second one, ten items, asks about your relationship with

_EJournal_. Your responses will help us understand how diverse a

group you are and what you want from us.

You can e-mail to peter.gorny@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de or

to us, or fax or snail mail to us. We can't quite promise you

anonymity, but we will remove all message-header information (from

everything sent here) before we start looking at what respondents say.

We anticipate coming up with some interesting totals and

percentages to share with you, but you shouldn't anticipate

sophisticated cross-referential analysis.

We want to refer to the two questionnaires as "1992 Surveys," so

please don't file this issue under "to be taken care of later" --

respond now. (We can use January responses, though.) Our thanks.

The next issue, which we hope to have on its way in just a few

days, delivers an essay about the interactive "Oracle" writing space,

with observations about the nature of "authorship" in an electronic

context. [line 96]

May you savor a super solstice season, and a noteworthy 1993.

Best wishes from _EJournal_: Ted Jennings, Ron Bangel, Dan Smith

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(There is a sample answer sheet at the end of this 22-question survey.)

-----------------8<----------------CUT-HERE----------------8<------------------

1. Libraries can ignore the existence of electronic journals (e-jrnls)

for at least another 5 years.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

2. Making e-jrnls available in libraries is necessary for their

success.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

3. Libraries should be leaders in encouraging e-jrnl use.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

4. People for whom computer links to e-jrnls are not available will be

left out of the information age.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

5. Creating a static copy of an e-jrnl defeats the reasons for

publishing in electronic format.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

[line 134]

6. E-jrnls may be useful for small specialized groups, but not for

large diverse groups.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

7. E-jrnls are apt to proliferate so rapidly and without standards that

no library will be able to keep up with the information contained

in them.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8. E-jrnls are currently accepted in the academic world as equals to

print.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

9. Libraries should accommodate e-jrnls as equals to print journals.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

10. E-jrnls will not be acceptable until abstracting services, e.g.

_Science Citation Index_, reference their contents.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

11. E-jrnls may be useful in reducing costs of publishing, storing and

making available technical information.

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

12. Are you currently reading EJournal (a) at home (b) in an office

13. If you are reading this at a place other than a library, would you

like a library to make it available?

(a) Yes

(b) No

14. E-jrnls in a library should be made available in a library's _______.

(a) information area

(b) journal stack area

(d) (a), (b), and (c)

(e) other:______________

15. In the computer terminal area where e-jrnls are made available

there should be ________________.

(a) a reference manual for help

(b) help screens on the terminal

(d) a librarian stationed there to give individual instruction

(e) some form of announcement that the computer

terminal has e-jrnls available

(f) all of the above

(g) other______________________

16. Would you advise that libraries "advertise" e-jrnls?

(a) Yes

(b) No

b. If you answered Yes, should advertisement be in the form of:

(a) Newsletters

(b) Notices on bulletin boards

(d) all of the above [line 210]

(e) in other ways, for example...______________________

17. How should a library identify e-jrnls accessible at some library

other than its own?

(a) in a list near the terminal

(b) in a list on a help screen of the terminal

18. If your library could make e-jrnls available, would you be willing

to pay any part of the subscription fees, computer account fee, or

the cost of printing or downloading it to a disk?

(a) Yes, some nominal fee of $2.00 or under

(b) Yes, a fee of under $10.00, but more than two

(d) No, no fees of any kind

19. Do you often read e-jrnls?

(a) Yes, but it varies from month to month

(b) Yes, at least once a month

(d) Yes, at least once a day

(e) This is the first time I have read an e-jrnl

20. Do you refer to e-jrnl articles when you write?

(a) Yes

(b) No

21. How did you find out about this

e-jrnl?______________________________________________

22. Do you read any electronic journals besides this one?

(a) Yes, I read _______________________________

(b) No [line 248]

General Information:

Country in which you read this journal: _______________

Your age is _________

Position of respondent: (a) professor, (b) student,

a. If in school:

Name of school: _________________________

Field of study/teaching: __________________________

Name of Reader (optional): ______________________________

Comments are welcome:

-----------------8<----------------CUT-HERE----------------8<------------------

Responses

(Please send your response in any one of the following ways)

By mail: By fax: By e mail:

Meta Reid 518: 276-3017 amendc@RPI.edu

65 23rd St.

Troy, N.Y. 12180

U.S.A.

Sample Answer Sheet

(For Questions 1-11; please answer with appropriate numeral)

1)__ 2)__ 3)__ 4)__ 5)__ 6)__ 7)__ 8)__ 9)__ 10)__ 11)__ [line 286]

12) a, b, c, d

13) Yes / No

14) a, b, c, d, e

15) a, b, c, d, e, f, g____________________

16) Yes / No a, b, c, d, e

17) a, b, c

18) a, b, c, d

19) a, b, c, d, e

20) Yes / No

21) How did you find out about this e-jrnl?____________________

22) Yes, I read ______________________________________________

General Information

Country: __________________

Age: ____

Position: a, b, c, d

a) If in school:

Name of school: ________________

Field of study: ________________

Name (optional): __________________

Comments: _________________________________________________________

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

__ E J o u r n a l __ Questionnaire

You can extract and e-mail this ten-item questionnaire, or send us

responses listed by number, or print the page(s) for faxing or

mailing.

-------------------8<----------------CUT-HERE----------------8<-----------------

1. If you are affiliated with a not-for-profit organization, what kind

is it?

(for instance: library, museum, government, education [line 324]

[arts and letters, math and science, social/behavioral

sciences;

engineering, law, medicine, business])?

Other not-for-profit?

2. If you are affiliated with a for-profit organization, what sort is

it?

(for instance: computing, engineering, finance, law,

manufacturing, medicine, publishing)?

Other for-profit?

3. How is _EJournal_ delivered to you for reading (e-mail [you are a

subscriber], Usenet connection, library terminal, paper

copy, other)?

4. What sort of 'ware do you use to read _EJournal_?

a. Is your connection a central computer facility

(via UN*X, VAX, IBM, other)?

b. Is it via a commercial program (CompuServe, Prodigy, MCI Mail,

other)?

c. What kind of platform do you sit in front of (dumb terminal,

PC/DOS, PC/Windows, Apple/Macintosh, Commodore/Amiga, other)?

5. Do you print _EJournal_ to save? to share?

6. Do you forward _EJournal_ to one or two people, or to a list of people?

7. Do you file _EJournal_ electronically for future reference?

8. Have you retrieved _EJournal_ issues (or Contents) from the FILESERV?

[line 362]

a) How often?

9. What do you hope you will find when you admit _EJournal_ to your

screen? Please close your eyes and recall (and record for us)

what sort of text you hoped you would find when this issue arrived.

[Here are some hints about subjects you could add to the hopes you

expressed above: education and pedagogy, matrix/network/cyberspace

musings, thoughts about "text" and "display," discussions of virtual

reality, arts, hypertext, interactive fiction, MUDs; *examples* of

uniquely electronic fiction and poetry and other arts; costs/benefits

of networking; ownership and copyright; controversy and polemic about

gender and power and disability and access to and uses of technology.]

10. Do you have any comments about what would prompt you to recommend that

others subscribe, and what act or omission would push you to unsubscribe?

(Please don't unsub because you hate surveys!)

-----------------8<----------------CUT-HERE----------------8<------------------

An extracted survey with your responses beneath each question, or a message

containing numbered responses, can be e-mailed directly to:

peter.gorny@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de

You could reply to _EJournal_ at our usual address:

ejournal@albany.bitnet

but we will forward your text to PG, who has kindly offered to compile your

electronic responses.

If you decide to use paper, you can fax your page or two, or use snail

mail, to our pseudo-virtual office:

FAX: (518) 442-4599 (ATTN: Ted Jennings) [line 400]

Snail: Ted Jennings

Department of English

University at Albany

Albany NY 12222 USA

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An Ownership/Copyright Exchange - Allen and Dilworth

by John B. Dilworth and Jonathan Allen

Department of Philosophy Dept. of Information and Computer Science

Western Michigan University University of California, Irvine

Supplement to the Volume 1 Number 3-2 (September, 1992) essay by John B.

Dilworth, "Credit, Compensation and Copyright: Owning Knowledge and Electronic

Networks."

Here, with their permission, is correspondence between John B. Dilworth and

Jonathan Allen on the subject of John B. Dilworth's "Credit, Compensation and

1992 issue (V1N3-2).

Readers may want to turn their dialogue into a polylog; we'd be happy to keep

this thread spinning. You can send for the complete text of John B. Dilworth's

essay with the following message addressed to the Listserver at Albany:

Address: LISTSERV@ALBANY.bitnet

Message: GET EJRNL V1N3-2

-- from Jonathan Allen:

Dear Professor Dilworth,

I found your recent Ejournal essay interesting and useful. It

opened my eyes to the importance of indirect compensation--the

gains in prestige and future career progress--for rewarding the

creation of intellectual property in the electronic era. Indirect [line 438]

compensation will be enough motivation to produce intellectual

property in more cases than are commonly assumed, I agree, but in

how many more cases? If most compensation is indirect, how will

the mix of intellectual artifacts produced be affected?

Indirect compensation, it seems to me, rests on two assumption: 1)

that the value of intellectual property is primarily related to

the value and the creativity of the ideas, rather than the effort

put into the collection, assembly, and expression of information;

and 2) that the career paths and personal motivations of authors

are closely tied to the potential for future publication. These

assumptions are valid for many academics, for instance, but not

always. I would guess that textbooks would be undervalued

relative to their commercial value.

In the larger publishing world, I would guess that the lack of

direct compensation would relatively discourage the production of

published materials that emphasize mundane effort over creative

ideas--manuals, directories, and reference works of all kinds. The

author that spends many months or years compiling a list of bed-

and-breakfast inns, or a detailed repair manual for a Honda Civic,

is probably a lot more interested in being compensated directly

than in adding an item to their vita. The increased uncertainty

(of an economic kind) could become a powerful disincentive to

produce. I don't want us to fall into the trap of thinking that

academic research work is the norm for our electronic future.

Thanks again for an interesting essay. Sincerely,

Jonathan Allen

Dept. of Information and Computer Science

University of California, Irvine.

-- reply from John Dilworth:

Dear Professor Allen,

Thanks for your interesting comments on my _EJournal_ essay. [line 476]

I agree that indirect compensation may be a less significant factor

in overall reward in the case of more routine literary tasks.

However, I don't regard this as clearly a problem which will have

to be addressed as electronic media become more prominent. Nor is

indirect compensation significant only in academic contexts.

If we go back to basics for a moment, and ask why people are

motivated to write anything at all, financial compensation (whether

direct or indirect) is only one factor. It has to be adequate

enough so that talented people think their efforts will not go

unrewarded, but not much more than that. Publishers generally are

swamped by literary submissions of all kinds, submitted for all

kinds of reasons, so some falloff in volume might even be welcomed

by them.

If excellent submissions became hard to obtain, publishers would

have to pay more direct compensation to non-academic authors, or

offer promises of larger advances on future works (another form of

indirect compensation). Electronic media could finance such

payments for general electronic publishing by charging subscribers

a fee of some kind. This is not clearly undesirable, because a

willingness to pay at least a minimal subscription fee does give

evidence of genuine demand for a literary product. Perhaps we need

not be too concerned about potentially discouraging authors whose

efforts no-one would have wanted to read anyway.

On the relevance of indirect compensation to non-academic as well

as academic authorship, adding an item demonstrating authorship

skills to one's job Resume is just as potentially rewarding as a

publication in an academic Vita. With the increasingly volatile

job market in every area, solid evidence of past achievement is

exactly what is needed for speedy promotion or beneficial re-

hiring. Though I emphasised creative originality in my essay,

superior expression or presentation would also be generally

rewarded through indirect compensation in such contexts.

With best wishes,

[line 514]

John B. Dilworth

Dept. of Philosophy, Western Michigan Univ., MI 49008

Dilworth@gw.wmich.edu

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Announcement about Simulation and Gaming --

"Simulation & Gaming: An International Journal of Theory, Design and Research"

(Sage Publications) is devoted to academic and applied issues in the fields of

simulation, computerized simulation, gaming, modeling, play, role-play and

active, experiential learning and related methodologies in education, training

and research. Manuscripts are welcome at any time. David Crookall, the

editor, can be reached at crookall@ua1vm.bitnet or crookall@ua.edu .

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------ I N F O R M A T I O N ------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About Subscribing and Sending for Back Issues:

In order to: Send to: This message:

Subscribe to _EJournal_: LISTSERV@ALBANY.bitnet SUB EJRNL Your Name

Get Contents/Abstracts

of previous issues: LISTSERV@ALBANY.bitnet GET EJRNL CONTENTS

Get Volume 1 Number 1: LISTSERV@ALBANY.bitnet GET EJRNL V1N1

Send mail to our "office": EJOURNAL@ALBANY.bitnet Your message...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About "Supplements":

_EJournal_ is experimenting with ways of revising, responding to, reworking, or

even retracting the texts we publish. Authors who want to address a subject

already broached --by others or by themselves-- may send texts for us to

consider publishing as a Supplement issue. Proposed supplements will not go

through as thorough an editorial review process as the essays they annotate.

[line 553]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About Letters:

_EJournal_ is willing publish letters to the editor. But we make no

predictions about how many, which ones, or what format. The "Letters" column

of a periodical is a habit of the paper environment, and _EJournal_ readers

can send outraged objections to our essays directly to the authors. Also, we

can publish substantial counter-statements as articles in their own right, or as

"Supplements." Even so, when we get brief, thoughtful statements that appear

to be of interest to many subscribers they will appear as "Letters." Please

send them to EJOURNAL@ALBANY.bitnet .

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About Reviews:

_EJournal_ is willing to publish reviews of almost anything that seems to fit

under our broad umbrella: the implications of electronic networks and texts.

We do not, however, solicit and thus cannot provide review copies of fiction,

prophecy, critiques, other texts, programs, hardware, lists or bulletin boards.

But if you would like to bring any publicly available information to our

readers' attention, send your review (any length) to us, or ask if writing one

sounds to us like a good idea.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About _EJournal_:

_EJournal_ is an all-electronic, Matrix distributed, peer-reviewed, academic

periodical. We are particularly interested in theory and practice surrounding

the creation, transmission, storage, interpretation, alteration and replication

of electronic text. We are also interested in the broader social,

psychological, literary, economic and pedagogical implications of computer-

mediated networks. The journal's essays are delivered free to Bitnet/Internet/

Usenet addressees. Recipients may make paper copies; _EJournal_ will provide

authenticated paper copy from our read-only archive for use by academic deans

or others. Individual essays, reviews, stories-- texts --sent to us will be

disseminated to subscribers as soon as they have been through the editorial

process, which will also be "paperless." We expect to offer access through

libraries to our electronic Contents and Abstracts, and to be indexed and

abstracted in appropriate places. [line 592]

Writers who think their texts might be appreciated by _EJournal_'s audience are

invited to forward files to EJOURNAL@ALBANY.bitnet . If you are wondering

about starting to write a piece for to us, feel free to ask if it sounds

appropriate. There are no "styling" guidelines; we try to be a little more

direct and lively than many paper publications, and considerably less hasty and

ephemeral than most postings to unreviewed electronic spaces. We read ASCII;

we look forward to experimenting with other transmission and display formats

and protocols.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Board of Advisors:

Stevan Harnad Princeton University

Dick Lanham University of California at L.A.

Ann Okerson Association of Research Libraries

Joe Raben City University of New York

Bob Scholes Brown University

Harry Whitaker University of Quebec at Montreal

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Consulting Editors - December, 1992

ahrens@hartford John Ahrens Hartford

ap01@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool

userlcbk@umichum Bill Condon Michigan

crone@cua Tom Crone Catholic University

dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca Doug Brent University of Calgary

djb85@albany Don Byrd University at Albany

donaldson@loyvax Randall Donaldson Loyola College

ds001451@ndsuvm1 Ray Wheeler North Dakota

erdt@pucal Terry Erdt Purdue Calumet

fac_askahn@vax1.acs.jmu.edu Arnie Kahn James Madison University

folger@yktvmv Davis Foulger IBM - Watson Center

george@gacvax1 G.N. Georgacarakos Gustavus Adolphus

gms@psuvm Gerry Santoro Pennsylvania State University

nrcgsh@ritvax Norm Coombs Rochester Institute of Technology

pmsgsl@ritvax Patrick M.Scanlon Rochester Institute of Technology

r0731@csuohio Nelson Pole Cleveland State University

richardj@surf.sics.bu.oz Joanna Richardson Bond University, Australia

ryle@urvax Martin Ryle University of Richmond

twbatson@gallua Trent Batson Gallaudet

wcooper@vm.ucs.ualberta.ca Wes Cooper Alberta

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

University at Albany Computing Services Center:

Isabel Nirenberg, Bob Pfeiffer; Ben Chi, Director

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Editor: Ted Jennings, English, University at Albany

Managing Editor: Ron Bangel, University at Albany

Assistant Managing Editor: Dan Smith, University at Albany

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

University at Albany State University of New York Albany, NY 12222 USA

From LISTSERV@uacsc2.albany.edu Tue Jan 5 16:04:04 1993

Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 16:03:04 -0500

From: Revised List Processor (1.7e) <LISTSERV@uacsc2.albany.edu>

Subject: File: "EJRNL V2N3"

To: pirmann@trident.usacs.rutgers.edu

_______ _______ __

/ _____/ /__ __/ / /

/ /__ / / ____ __ __ __ ___ __ __ ____ / /

/ ___/ __ / / / __ \ / / / / / //__/ / //_ \ / __ \ / /

/ /____ / /_/ / / /_/ / / /_/ / / / / / / / / /_/ / / /

\_____/ \____/ \____/ \____/ /_/ /_/ /_/ \__/_/ /_/

August, 1992 _EJournal_ Volume 2 Number 3 ISSN# 1054-1055

There are 730 lines in this issue.

An Electronic Journal concerned with the

implications of electronic networks and texts.

2680 Subscribers in 38 Countries

University at Albany, State University of New York

ejournal@albany.bitnet

CONTENTS:

Editorial Notes - [ Begin at line 62 ]

Letters about V2N2 (David Coniam on "Literacy ....")

from Peter Graham [ Begins at line 92 ]

from Bret Pettichord [ Begins at line 147 ]

from Philip Taylor [ Begins at line 254 ]

from Alvanir Carvalho [ Begins at line 343 ]

[ To get V2N2, send to LISTSERV@ALBANY

the one-line message GET EJRNL V2N2 ]

Letter about e-journal layout, ASCII, bandwidth [ Begins at line 379 ]

from Murry Christensen

Announcement from Joe Raben about SCHOLAR [ Begins at line 477 ]

Inquiry from Michel Lenoble about Computer Generated Literature

[ Begins at line 555 ]

Information - [ Begins at line 616 ]

About Subscriptions and Back Issues

About Supplements to Previous Texts

About Letters to the Editor

About Reviews

About _EJournal_

People - [ Begins at line 689 ]

Board of Advisors

Consulting Editors

[line 53]

********************************************************************************

* _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away the journal and its *

* contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and all financial interest is hereby *

* assigned to the acknowledged authors of individual texts. This notification *

* must accompany all distribution of _EJournal_. *

********************************************************************************

Editorial Notes -

This is our first "letters" issue. There have been five

responses to David Coniam's essay about children and keyboards (and to

my editorial). One of them was a request to reprint his piece in the

_Journal of Computing in Childhood Education_. One, from Brazil, was a

report of a "test," of sorts, of David's hypothesis. I have not been

able to reach David to solicit his replies to the writers, but I am

taking advantage of the medium to share the letters now, knowing that we

can distribute his reactions to them, if he wants us to, as soon as we

do reestablish electronic contact.

There is also an "unprovoked" letter to the editor, this one

about the ways that network transmission constricts communication in one

dimension even as it makes exchanges quick and easy in another.

There are also an announcement and an inquiry that seem

related to _Ejournal_'s purpose and (probably) to our readers'

interests.

Han Geurdes has had to resign as a Consulting Editor. I am

canvassing ten people who have asked about joining that group to see if

they are still interested, and would be happy to receive names,

addresses, interests and "qualifications" from anyone else who would

like to be in the queue.

_EJournal_ would especially like to look at essays about virtual

reality (including MUDs) and about interactive fiction (hypertext

make-believe). Robert Coover's article "The End of the Book" in the

NYTimes Book Review of 6/21/92 pointed to _EJournal_ as a place where

such essays appear; a review of Stuart Moulthrop's _Victory Garden_

would seem especially appropriate. Any volunteers?

[line 90]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Mid-June, 1992

Editor, _EJournal_]

A few comments on 2.2 just received:

1) The jargon reference to text being "privileged" over sound was

jarring to me. I associate it with a school of historical and literary

analysis. Is that an explicit association you intend? Outside of that

context, use of that verb is unusual and I suspect unnecessary.

2) I found David Coniam's article on handwriting and keyboarding fairly

self-indulgent. In spite of the seeming authentication lent by the

references, the assertions in the paper seemed to me very ad hoc and

anecdotal. His early references to the times-tables seemed ambiguous to

me: should we or should we not memorize them? If not, what other means

is there than rote, or going through numerous repetitive exercises? In

memorizing a poem, for example, I don't pretend to be trying to feel and

understand its meaning as I work on each line and phrase; yet having

memorized it I feel I have something of enormous value that comes back

for years.

Coniam's swipe at Latin is another example of an assertion, not backed

up, and for questionable purpose. Perhaps he doesn't like Latin; that's

his privilege. But many people have found it indeed an aid to thought

and expression even in English; his blanket condemnation is just as ad

hoc as their own approval.

I'm delighted to hear of the successes and progress of his child, but it

doesn't seem of a whole lot of generalizable use to me. Does the

editorial board listed at the end of Ejournal do reviews and comments of

mss? Did they on this one?

--Peter Graham, Rutgers University.

[Editor's reply, 15 June 1992]

Dear Peter - Thanks for your letter about _EJournal_ v2n2. May we

consider it a formal (or even informal) "letter to the editor," intended

for publication? David Coniam might want to respond -- or might not.

[line 131]

Meanwhile, my quick answers to two of your questions: I didn't mean to sound

like an advocate of a particular "school" of analysis, but I do find that the

way I thought I was using "privilege" strikes chords in me that other phrasings

do not. Perhaps "giving undue weight, by implication, [to sight] because of

the absence of an alternative [hearing] not explicitly mentioned" would have

been more thorough. But I'm not sure that that phrasing would have done the

job as well as "priviliged" seemed to -- to me.

The board does and did offer comments, suggestions, opinions, approvals,

disapprovals; I alone am responsible for assessing the several responses and

deciding whether to accept a particular essay.

Thanks again for your thoughts. Best, Ted Jennings

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Mid-June, 1992]

To: Ted Jennings and David Coniam

Re: Writing as punishment and work

Ted, You mention [in the Editorial] that writing is often used as a

punishment and that people often don't look forward to this. You mention

that people rarely enjoy having to take notes at meetings. You contrast

this with speech, which people don't have to learn at school and which

is not a punishment.

Anyway, i wonder if these reactions aren't better described as a

difference between being told to do something and doing something on

your own initiative. For example, people often take their own notes at

meetings without displeasure. What makes the task possibly onerous is

having to take them for everybody. This means that you'll have to make

sure you don't forget anything that other people think is important, and

the like. But people often dislike having to speak in front of other

people as well.

In regards to your and David Coniam's remarks on the future of

handwriting, i'd just like to say that i have machines both at home

and at work, but that when i'm working on serious writing, i prefer

doing the first draft by hand on paper. Maybe i'm a luddite, but i

can't look forward to a day when children will not know how to use a

pen. [line 171]

Also i wonder if it will really happen. A pocket calculator can now be

purchased for the price of a notebook. But even to use one, one needs to

know how to write letters in order to write down the results. The

alternative would be to get a paper-tape calculator, but those are far

more expensive.

Will electronic keyboards and word processors someday be as common as

calculators are today? Will you be able to buy one for ten bucks at the

grocery store? Will it have a built in printer? What will the market be

for such a device? Students, professionals, managers, anyone else? Would

people use it for their grocery lists?

What seems to me to be more likely is that a growing class of

illiterates will be created alongside a computer-literate elite and that

the computerization of education will accelerate the split between these

two classes. Giving children a computer may enhance their sense of

control over the world, but so would giving them a slave. But not all

children are going to get computers, and those that don't will have

their sense of control reduced. Also, for the price of one piece of

decent educational software, i could get my son several perfectly fun

and educational activity books.

I used to teach logo to children. I once taught it to a three-year-old.

My son is now 6 and i haven't taught it to him. Maybe i will someday,

but he hasn't asked and i think it's more important to just encourage

his drawing/writing skills, his vocabulary, and his social skills.

That's a point that neither of you mention: learning to draw letters and

to draw them well helps one learn how to draw. I think that people's

general unwillingness to draw is more problematic than their

unwillingness to write. I'm presently employed as a graphics software

tester, but i still think that it is much easier to do quick sketches

with pencil and paper than with a computer.

On pen-based computing: it is not proposed as a replacement for a

keyboard for those with a large amount of writing. Instead it is

proposed as an interface to sales-forms, pocket calendars, and for

marking comments on things other people have written. Whether these

tasks will taken over by pen-based computers or not, they will require

people to have hand writing skills. [line 212]

You mention all the labor and thought that it takes to form letters and

words by hand and contrast it with the ease of the computer. However,

you ignore the fact that computers have a larger amount of overhead. I

have to name the file, remember the name, save it or it will be lost.

With paper none of this is necessary at all. Does your son know how to

do this, or do you come in and help him? When you've finished drawing

your letters, there they are, done. With a computer, you have to

remember the print command. I still have to help my wife, much less my

son, with this sometimes to get it to print right. With paper, this

isn't even an issue.

Regarding Papert's enthusiasm over computer's in the school: Children do

well whenever they are given a lot of attention. Computers are one way

of doing this. Is this the best way? Is this the most cost-effective?

Will it provide better job training? I don't know, but i think that you

and Papert are over-enthusiastic on these matters.

Bret Pettichord

bret@ileaf.com

P.S. Ted, you should include the address you want letters to be sent to

in "About Letters".

[15-JUN-1992 11:02:35.55]

Bret - I particularly appreciate your thoughts because you, too, are a

witness to the environment David Coniam writes about. May I assume that

your letter is indeed a "letter to the editor," and that you wouldn't

mind our publishing it, with (or without) other letters, responses,

etc.?

Thanks, too, for the idea of putting _EJournal_'s address even closer to

the note about Letters! I thought the address was in too many places,

but I left it out of a crucial slot.

Best, Ted Jennings

[line 252]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Mid-June, 1992]

Sir ---

_EJ_, V2N2, raises some interesting questions to which I would like to

respond.

>>> Editorial 1 - Should we say goodbye to "text"?

Surely not; everything that I have read so far in _EJ_ is, purely and

simply, text (with the sole exception of the _EJ_ Logo). Unless and

until contributions to _EJ_ contain non-textual elements, `text' will

remain the most descriptive term for its content.

>>> In contrast, the Mathematics section of the U.K. High Schools' National

>>> Curriculum (1990) states that pupils still need to know their times tables,

>>> but that the tables should not simply be rote-learnt.

I do not have a copy of this document to hand, but I most sincerely hope

that it does _not_ refer to their ``times tables''; the tables are

_multiplication_ tables, and any reference to them as ``times'' tables

will only encourage that most sloppy of usages, sadly only too common

among today's comprehensively [sic] educated children, ``to times by'',

meaning ``to multiply by''.

> A popular slogan was "Learning Latin is good for your mind". What nonsense:

>>> the learning of Latin was simply a test of memory and very little else.

I think that as the author has permitted himself the use of ``What

nonsense'', I may respond in kind: What nonsense: the learning of

Latin forms the soundest basis not only for the learning of modern

European tongues (many of which reveal their Latin or Greek origins in a

most transparent way to the classically educated scholar), but also for

the appreciation and understanding of one's own native tongue, be it

<Am.E> or <Br.E>. If today's children were still educated in the

classics, the nonsensical ``flammable'' designation now apparently

mandatory on _inflammable_ substances would never have been deemed

necessary for widespread comprehension.

[line 292]

>>> The typed instructions:

>>> BK 200 LT 90 FD 100

>>> would produce a figure that resembles the letter "L," for instance.

But how much better, surely, if the instructions had read

Back 200 Left 90 Forward 100

such that the child would be using natural English commands, rather than

a particularly arbitrary, cryptic and terse computerese. Is it entirely

coincidental that cryptic consonant groups are becoming equally

widespread both within (CD, LS, MV) and without (Toys <Reversed-R> Us,

Fish N Chips) the computing domain?

>>> The way in which written Chinese used to be taught in the first years of

>>> Chinese primary schools (and still is in many schools in China and Hong

>>> Kong) can be seen as representing an extreme of misplaced emphasis. Not

>>> only was the order of the strokes in which one wrote a character

>>> important, but considerable emphasis was also placed on the way the

>>> brush that produced those strokes was held.

Misplaced emphasis? Surely the most appropriate and correctly placed

emphasis in the world. The fortunate Chinese child who is properly

instructed in the ancient art of Chinese calligraphy will be able to

produce manuscripts which are a joy to behold, even to those of us

unfortunate enough not to be able to appreciate their semantics.

Compare the elegance of the characters formed by traditional Chinese

brush strokes with the puerile scribblings of the average European or

American child whose only experience of a writing implement is a

disposable ball-point pen. Once, Sir, we too valued a well-formed hand

as a mark of education, and taught copperplate; now we regard the

acquisition of _any_ skill in writing as a significant achievement, and

teach only the most simple and rudimentary letter forms. The increasing

use and ultimate ubiquity of the personal computer will simply hasten

the day when literacy and numeracy finally cease to exist.

[line 330]

Yours provocatively,

Philip Taylor, RHBNC.

[15-JUN-1992 12:15:39.80]

Dear Philip - Thanks for your provocative letter. We expect to assemble

and distribute a bundle of "What Nonsense" communications, accompanied

perhaps by David Coniam's responses. Best, Ted Jennings

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 29 Jul 92 14:19:50 BS3

From: "alvanir carvalho - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil" <ALVANIR@BRLNCC.BITNET>

Subject: Letter to the Editor

Illiteracy rate is quite high in Brazil. It is part of the reason for

the backwardness of my country.

Perhaps you folks would like to know that, after reading the article

"Literacy for the Next Generation : Writing Without Handwriting"

by David Coniam, Chinese University of Hong Kong

I decided to give it a trial.

As it happens, my wyfe and me do enjoy entertainning, from time to time,

a 5 years old girl, the daughter of the concierge at our apartment

building, in Rio de Janeiro. The parents of that girl are both

illiterate so I undertook the job of teaching her to read and to write.

She was already able to recognize some letters I did print on small

peaces of papercard. However, after reading David Coniam's article, I

asked the girl if she would like to use my electric typewriter ( for I

do not have a micro computer in the house ). Her progress was

astonishing.

The girl was much excited about typing words she would already

understand its meaning, such as the names of her parents and her own

name. She is now able to formulate short sentences of her own. There is

no doubt, however, how much more she would be learning if she would be

able to use a micro computer. [line 370]

My congratulations to David Coniam for his most useful "discovery".

[Alvanir Caravalho

alvanir@brlncc]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 24 Jul 92 09:58:15 EDT

From: Murry Christensen <71521.2515@CompuServe.COM>

Subject: letter to editor

Greetings from the network nation. In keeping with the

informality which is (at least partly) in keeping with one of the stated

purposes of EJournal, I'd like to explore two related, though for the

sake of clarity best kept distinct, issues which might be interesting to

the readership (which is what?? an interesting question in itself,

better suited to the survey inclined?).

First, though, a quick precis of my background will make my interest in

these topics more clear. MA in English Literature and writing from

Univ. of Michigan, with BA minor in Philosophy. 15 years experience in

the media business: starting with advertising typography and mechanical

production; industrial multi-media (slide shows, theater/trade shows,

videotape) as designer, writer, producer; information design (slides

mostly) for financial, biotech, computer and telecommunications;

interactive software and hypertext design and production. I list this

not as some ticketpunching, credential-waving exercise, but to give a

sense of what experience drives the following concerns.

I'd be interested in seeing EJournal address in some form two issues

that over time have come to concern me more and more:

1.) A consideration of the ways in which formal narrative structure

might be adapted to or expanded by the capabilities provided by

interactive software platforms. Hypertext linking, interactive

"front-ends," direct manipulation of view point are a few of the new

capabilities available to the author of narrative fiction. I've built

several of these to varying degrees of sophistication. I've also been

working on a more formal article and/or essay along these lines. In its

best-realized form this article would itself be a hypertext, including

examples of the kinds of interfaces described. But, in order for this

to happen we'd (in the generic sense) have to confront the second of my

concerns... [line 414]

2.) Is ANYBODY else out there as frustrated (to the point of beating my

head against the monitor) by the absolute paucity of communication tools

*actually* available to the _cyberspace_ communicator? :-(

Look at this last sentence...what a pathetic arsenal of communication

tools. And that pretty much exhausts what's available! This in a world

that gives any user of any reasonably-competent word processor scaleable

typefaces, embedded graphics, at least simple text linking. Yet the

instant you want to make that "document" available to others on-line all

the meaning inhering in anything other than raw ASCII text gets stripped

away. Put it on the wire and instantly we all become visually

disadvantaged (and I wouldn't be afraid to propose perhaps in some way

intellectually-mangled also).

A single example: the typographic industry spent several hundred years

developing the _technic_ and the _technique_ to accomplish quite subtle

feats of explicit and implicit communication, only to find that at the

very moment the means became available to distribute that artifact in

ways that would enrich all of us...it was all taken away. "The Lord

giveth and the Lord taketh away." I hope that I'm not the only one on

whom the irony is not lost. Just as a simple metaphor, the kinds of

academic publications that form the community of which EJournal is some

(slightly renegade?) part are very conservative in general typographic

and visual convention, extremely formal understates it, yet even they

make use of a much broader range of cognitive clues, tools, and devices

than does EJournal. I'm absolutely not arguing for the kind of

wacked-out layout and typography you might see in "Mondo 2000" or "The

Face," nor am I delivering any particular critique of EJournal (except

as it provides an example of my point). But there are so many subtle

aids to understanding that can't be crushed into the "ASCII cage."

Reminds me of the story about the kindergarten teacher who began to find

it difficult to talk to adults, so atrophied had the intellectual skills

become.

Until this loss of capability is acknowledged and remedied it seems to

me (with my particular view of how the medium can be used) that much of

the breathless discussion of millenarian impact is pretty hollow. Until

we fix this "loss of band-width" we're only talking about distribution,

not revolution...or at best a revolution hand-delivered, like 1848. At

a cognitive level we might consider the ways in which the restricted

vocabulary (in the larger sense I'm arguing for) offered by cyberspace

as it currently exists is in fact "dumbing down" our discourse. Or the

political implications of islands of capability (IBM vs. Mac vs. NEXT

vs. whatever) which, if able to communicate at all, have to do so by

stripping out all strictly non-textual, non-linear clues/cues before the

words can pass the border. Pretty Stalinist? [line 461]

I'll turn the word-machine off for this first pass, but these issues

warrant some consideration and it seems like EJournal might be a good

place to begin some discussion. I've tried other places (like CompuServe),

but the conversation always seems to end up with endless chat about the

merits of paint program A vs. paint program B. Not very rewarding. I hope

this doesn't sound like a rant (except where I wanted it to), but I guess

my frustration shows. All that (potential) capability and so little of it

accessible. What a shame.

Murry Christensen

Art & Science, Inc.

71521.2515@compuserve.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Received from Joe Raben in June 1992]

* * * * * * * * *

The first release of SCHOLAR, an online news service

for natural language processors, will be available

in mid-August 1992. Its contents include

Abstracts from the following journals:

Computational Linguistics, 17:4

System, 19:1/2,3,4

Machine Translation, 6:1,2,3

Computers and the Humanities, 25:1,2/3,4,5

Reports on the following projects:

A European Ph.D. in Linguistics

CTI Center for Textual Studies

Georgetown Center for Text and Technology

ARTFL: American and French Research on the Tresor

de la Langue francaise

A short review of _Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush

and the Mind's Machine_ by James N. Nyce and Paul

D. Kahn [line 501]

A full-length review of _Hypermedia and Literary Stud-

ies_ ed. Paul Delaney and Gedorge P. Landow

A notice of WinGreek: Fonts for Greek and Hebrew

A CD-ROM of Latin texts

A calendar of language-processing-related events

- - - - - - - - -

To receive this and future releases by email, send a

message to

<listserv@cunyvm.cuny.edu>

as follows:

subscribe scholar [your full name]

To receive this release by anonymous ftp send the

following:

ftp jhuvm.hcf.jhu.edu

ftp 128.220.2.2

At the login: prompt, type

anonymous or SCHOLAR

At the password: prompt, type

[your own login id]

To locate the SCHOLAR files, type

get index.SCHOLAR [line 541]

To close the connection, type

quit

- - - - - -

Material for inclusion in future releases should be

sent as e-mail to <jqrqc@cunyvm.cuny.edu> or mailed to

SCHOLAR, P.O. Box F, New York NY 10028-0025.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Michel Lenoble asked that we publish his request for information about

Computer Generated Literature west of the Atlantic. There's a

sketch of CGL following Michel's note. Please send responses to

lenoblem@ere.montreal.ca

I am gathering information about Computer Generated Literature

(CGL) in order to write a long article on the state of CGL on this side

of the Atlantic. Information about bibliographical references,

databanks, and e-adresses of persons or groups involved in CGL is

especially welcomed. I seek information in particular about:

- active groups or individuals or former researchers, including

programmers and writers

- different movements, associations, schools

- published or distributed CGL texts, or anthologies, or journals

- short stories, novels, poems or scenarios

- monographs, journal articles, research papers devoted to CGL

- references to CGL in "normally" written literary texts

Computer Generated Literature (CGL) refers to fully automated

literary text generation -- to literary texts produced by computer

programs. CGL does not include literary texts written by human authors,

even if they were written directly on computers. (One might debate

whether Interactive Fiction (IF) and multi-authored literary texts

(MALT) belong to the realm of CGL.) [line 579]

A typology of Computer Generated Literary texts could be

organized according to several different criteria, such as:

- the starting data: vocabulary databases, knowledge bases,

redaction rules, textual corpora, etc.

- the generation programs: substitutional, aleatory, autonomous,

interactive; typographical animation, modulatory programs with

integrated auto-corrective functions, etc.

- the various "types" of generated texts: full texts versus frames or

scenarios, short stories, poems, unique finite texts versus infinite

texts (perhaps interactive fiction and multi-authored texts), etc.

- the transmission / inscription medium: printed texts, floppy

texts, potential texts (literature to be generated when the user

/ reader starts the CGL program), etc.

CGL appears to be more common in Europe and particularly in

France, where it is part of a literary tendency to explore the limits of

literary writing, literary texts and literariness. At its origin, we

could mention combinatory literature, OULIPO endeavours, the

automatists, etc. Nowadays, two or three Computer Generated Poetry

reviews are regularly issued by active writer / programmer groups on

floppy disks. One conference has already been organized, at

Cerisy-la-Salle.

Thank you for your help.

===============================================================================

Michel Lenoble |

Litterature Comparee | NOUVELLE ADRESSE - NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS

Universite de Montreal | ---> lenoblem@ere.umontreal.ca

C.P. 6128, Succ. "A" |

MONTREAL (Quebec) | Tel.: (514) 288-3916

Canada - H3C 3J7 |

===============================================================================

[line 614]

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