(Re)Turning to Hypertext: Mattering Digital Learning Spaces

ABSTRACT

This essay argues for a (re)turn to the potential of hypertext by entangling it with/in material rhetorics. A (re)turning—turning over again—troubles and decolonizes traditional understandings of hypertext as either technological product or trope by demonstrating how hypertextuality is [also] a matter of matter. More specifically, this essay uses ethnography as “deep theorization” to extend Angela Haas’s notion of wampum-as-hypertext. I analyze the hypertextual rhetoricity of matter in students’ digital learning environments and demonstrate how these places iteratively become agential and transformative, thus (re)making the digital learning experience. This theorization of digital-learning-spaces-as-hypertexts draws attention to the need to (re)conceptualize digital spaces in terms beyond that of efficiency and carefully (re)consider what it means to [better] teach with/in digitally mediated environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital rhetorics
• hypertext
• materiality

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This text works to embody specters of hypertextuality where possible. For example, the images included in this essay are themselves acts of single-multiplicity, and I offer only one potential reading of them. Further, the material arrangement of information has been altered by relocating method/ology to the endnotes. Such a move doesn’t diminish the importance of the method/ology; instead, precisely because this nonlinear move is so unexpected it draws further attention to it.

² This research project included ten graduate students enrolled in synchronous, online classes at a large state institution and employed a contextual inquiry methodological framework. Per Rex Hartson and Pardha Pyla, contextual inquiry uses multiple data collection practices to observe participants’ “work activities as they are doing them [in situ] in their own work context” (91–92). In order to gain access to students’ learning environments, participants in this Institutional Review Board-approved study provided weekly images, over an eight-week period, of their digital-material learning environments as well as material-use diaries. Material-use diaries are similar to time-use diaries (Hart-Davidson) and served to contextualize participants’ image data. At the completion of the study, the participants completed a 1-hour photo-elicitation interview that provided further depth and allowed participants to recount their material experiences as students in a fully online course. Pigg previously employed a similar research method/ology to investigate the agentive role of matter on students’ composition practices in “semi-public places” (251) such as campus coffee shops. This study extends Pigg’s work in that all the data provided by participants came from their private, at-home, learning spaces. While the investigation of private learning spaces was not an explicit element of the research design, its emergence through the research process nevertheless provides a valuable point of extension from existing research on the consequence of matter with/in students’ learning environments.

³ A commonly cited example of intra-action is Latour’s (Pandora’s) citizen-gun example. It’s not that just a gun or a person does the killing; it’s that the person-with-gun is substantively different than a person-without-gun. The gun (re)makes the person as the person likewise (re)makes the gun.

⁴ I’ve presented the six characteristics of hypertextuality in the same order that Haas does in “Wampum as Hypertext.” There is no priority or hierarchy. Rather, I read these features as entangled with/in one another. Like distributed agency and intra-activity, the concept of entanglement is central to material theory. Entanglement draws on Annemarie Mol’s idea of single-multiplicity—both one and many—and speaks to nonclassical relations among entities, parts, and possibilities (75). Entanglement shouldn’t be thought of as a tapestry where different colored threads are woven together; instead, entanglement entails the emergence of a single-multiple collective. My use of a table to present Haas’s six [material] characteristics of hypertextuality is [another] nod to multiplicity in form. This table, however, is an abridged presentation of Haas’s scholarship and only begins to capture the depth and disciplinary importance of the research that can only be found in her original article.

⁵ Another embodied example of single-multiplicity is the way that anemia is performed in a variety of ways (clinical, laboratory, and pathopsychological), each “different versions, different performances, different realities, that co-exist in the present” (Mol 79). Similarly, learning spaces exist as more than one but less than many.