Not too long ago, someone asked me to predict where interactive media and the Internet would be five years from now. I refused to give an answer, because I don’t get to decide. The beauty of a grassroots, bottom-up social movement like in the Blogosphere is that the social structures provide an organic kind of direction and structure, and the social structure is the authority, not “industry leaders” or “futurists” or any other professional prognosticators striving for control or a first-mover advantage.

Interactivity is about giving up control.

What I strive to do as a designer and a participant in this grassroots social movement is to create tools that empower the most people with enough freedom to set their own directions. I’m not interested in herding cats. I am interested in watching and learning inductively from where cats go.

Atlanta Media Bloggers (launched 2006, now dormant) Original artwork by Denny Lester. Link: www.serendipit-e.com/mediabloggers	Weston Productions News site (launched 2004, now dormant) Link: www.serendipit-e.com/weston
Spinning and Being Spun: The idea of journalism in a postmodern age (launched 2005, now dormant) Link: www.serendipit-e.com/spinning	Serendipit-e, Inc. Communities and Tools for Active Learners (launched 2000 in HTML, relaunched Typepad 2003, now dormant) Link: www.serendipit-e.com
my cnn: employee news intranet blog + alerts moblog (in development 2006, now dormant). no public access	my cnn: employee news alerts moblog (in development 2006, now dormant). no public access
A Bluestem Prairie: News from Minnesota’s First Congressional District (launched 2006, now one of most influential blogs in Minnesota) Link: www.bluestemprairie.com	Traveling with Crows (launched 2006) Link: www.serendipit-e.com/traveling_with_crows

Memorial blog for Dr. Susan Barnes (launched 2006) 2,500 hits in 1st 48 hours online, following global time zones starting in NZ/Australia within hours of launch Link: www.serendipit-e.com/drsusanbarnes	Memorial blog for James Tillotson Whitehead (launched 2003, featured as virtual memorial to accompany academic conference memorials) Link: www.serendipit-e.com/whitehead
Joshua Kucera: Freelance Writer and Int’l Journalist (launched 2003 as The Other Side) Link: www.joshuakucera.net/	Hilltown Farmland Preservation: Information and Discussion about Farmland Preservation in Hilltown Township, PA (launched 2006) Link: www.hilltownfarmlandpreservation.org
Serendipit-e, Inc. Research Archive & Portfolio (launched 2003) Link: www.serendipit-e.com/boeseportfolio	Chris Boese’s Weblog (launched 2002) Link: www.serendipit-e.com/blog
Headpiece Filled With Straw (poetry journal) Link: www.serendipit-e.com/hollow	Darkroom Glories Poetry Manuscript Link: www.serendipit-e.com/poems
Project Wet and Wild (award-winning hypertext essay) Link: www.serendipit-e.com/wetwild	are you with me, dr. wu? (steely dan/jazz fan blog) Link: www.serendipit-e.com/wu

Film clips and hyperlinks in graduate theses raise tough copyright and open-source issues

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i34/34a04101.htm

http://chronicle.com/article/Digital-Dissertation-Dust-Up/20201

By PETER MONAGHAN

Virginia A. Kuhn, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, was having dissertation trouble.

Nothing unusual about that.

But it wasn’t that Ms. Kuhn was struggling to finish her thesis. The trouble was that officials at the institution could not figure out whether to accept it.

Her thesis is not a printed document. It was born digital, in a multimedia format full of film clips, hyperlinks to other parts of the work, and other uses of electronic media.

There was no way to measure the margins to make sure they met the university’s specifications, which are notoriously strict at many institutions. But that was a minor concern. The biggest issue was copyright. Citing a snippet of text in a printed thesis is standard procedure, but including a piece of video or a still picture, which Ms. Kuhn says is critical to explain her points, can raise the ire of copyright holders, and sound the alarm among university attorneys.

Although Ms. Kuhn lists detailed citations for all multimedia works in her thesis, she refused to ask permission to include them, because she insists that she should be able to cite them in the same way that print sources have long been cited. She says: “If you ask for permission, you’re screwed because you imply that you legally need it.”

Instead, she says, “I’m doing all that’s incumbent on me legally to establish fair use.”

The topic of the work, as it happens, is the challenges of adopting new technologies in teaching and learning.

Even though university officials first approved her dissertation and tentatively granted her a doctorate in December, they quickly reconsidered and put a hold on her transcript while they deliberated on whether they could accept the thesis. Only in late March did the university grant her degree, after a nerve-racking delay. Ms. Kuhn, now a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, is among a very few students to compose a dissertation completely in multimedia format. Many dissertations now include some film, sound, or other media files. Few, however, appear to have been conceived as multimedia projects from the start.

Why not just stick to the traditional format?

“As I did my research,” says Ms. Kuhn, “I became convinced that I had to put it in this digital format, because the subject is what happens to writing, now, in this digital age. I couldn’t make the argument without the digital format.”

An Enhanced Book

The form of Ms. Kuhn’s dissertation is based on that of a regular book, but with many nonstandard features. Its online pages are heavy with text, like a printed book, but when a user moves the cursor over the pages, hyperlinks pop up, leading to embedded information. And images, when clicked on, open windows containing more-detailed captions, or a film clip, or citations. An electronic “sticky note” feature lets users record comments and reactions for their own later reference.

“I made it look traditional so it wouldn’t be completely alienating for a university user,” says Ms. Kuhn.

To produce the electronic work, she used TK3, a software platform designed by Robert Stein, research director at USC’s Institute for the Future of the Book. An acclaimed figure in new-media circles, Mr. Stein is the founder of Night Kitchen, a seven-year-old company that develops writing tools for electronic publishing.

Ms. Kuhn first secured the approval of her dissertation committee, whose members became enthusiastic after initially hesitating. When her doctorate was put on hold, committee members went to bat for her.

She assured University of Wisconsin officials she was willing to convert the document from the TK3 platform to an open-source program that Mr. Stein and colleagues have developed, called Sophie, which Mr. Stein says is specifically designed to “be alive for a long time.” The Sophie project is part of his work with the Institute for the Future of the Book, a collaboration between USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication and Columbia University. The software allows writers and readers to have conversations within books — both live “chats” and exchanges through comments and annotations.

The software does not answer the thorny copyright questions, though.

In her dissertation Ms. Kuhn discusses such subjects as what it means in the era of digitized media to reproduce images. That and, as she puts it, “why should you pay copyright fees to cite an image but not a word?”

She argues that citing works, the way one cites texts, should be enough. Copyright laws, as currently enforced, she says, “limit what can be put out there,” and discriminate against people without a lot of money. “The rich can afford to pay Hollywood for those clips.”

In fact, she does not know how much copyright clearances would cost her were she to request them. But she is certain that it would be more than a beginning academic could afford.

While the status of Ms. Kuhn’s dissertation remained in limbo, some graduate-school officials said they were not interested in helping her break down copyright barriers, even though current copyright laws have never contemplated cases like hers.

Saving a Copy

Storing the dissertation could also cause problems, says Ewa E. Barczyk, interim director of the Golda Meir Library at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

The University of Wisconsin System is setting up a repository for a variety of digital documents from the system’s campuses. But the library requires that materials that are placed in the archive be “open-access compliant,” she says, so that anyone can get to them. And, she says, if Ms. Kuhn’s work is included in such a repository, that may create legal problems because copyright holders may consider the document’s accessibility a breach of their copyrights.

The university’s legal department, however, has washed its hands of the dissertation. “After reviewing the matter, we concluded that the copyright issues were the concern of the student and publisher, not UWM,” says Robin L. Van Harpen, the campus’s senior university legal counsel, in an e-mail message.

For members of Ms. Kuhn’s doctoral committee, the delay in approval of her work became frustrating. “I don’t see what Virginia did as anything less than a solid, original dissertation,” says one of them, Charles I. Schuster, associate dean of humanities. “It met all the requirements: good argument, exploratory, full references and sources, innovative.”

Even the copyright concerns struck him as misplaced. The concept of “fair use” should apply, he said, because “this is a dissertation, not a commercial property.”

Legal experts agree. “It seems to be classic fair use,” says Kenneth D. Salomon, a Washington lawyer who often represents colleges in intellectual-property cases.

Courts determine fair use by considering several questions, says Peter Jaszi, a professor of law at American University. Is the use educational? Is it for commercial ends? Does it do measurable harm to a copyright holder’s prospects in the marketplace? Are the clips unnecessarily long or numerous?

He agrees with Ms. Kuhn that images should be evaluated just as text is. “Case law makes that absolutely clear,” he says.

Of course, he says, universities’ lawyers are paid to avoid risk, but they should beware of doing so at the cost of legitimate educational and research goals.

He recommends that representatives of various academic groups, including developers of multimedia works, do what members of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies have done over the last decade: formulate a document of best practices relating to fair use, and stake a claim to it.

But even court rulings, say the two lawyers, do not prevent organizations such as University Microfilms Inc., the publisher and repository of 98 percent of doctoral dissertations completed in the United States, from imposing their own rules. And, in fact, Milwaukee officials did meet opposition when they tried to submit Ms. Kuhn’s work to that archive.

The company, which is now part of ProQuest Information and Learning, has been accepting dissertations in CD-ROM format since 1996. Sound, video, and other nontext files can be uploaded to the company using an online submissions process. But those files must be in “standard” formats — and the TK3 software platform does not qualify.

Nor does Ms. Kuhn’s dissertation meet the company’s copyright-compliance requirements. Tina Orozco, a spokesperson for ProQuest, said in an e-mail message: “While we are seeing many challenges to copyright ‘standard practice’ and the scope of ‘fair use’ is being debated across academia and the global media, we are obligated to protect our authors to the extent possible and to comply with the standards set by our agreement with the Library of Congress.”

According to company policy, authors must obtain “written permission to reproduce copyrighted images, video, graphics, animation, data, and images of individuals.” When copyright questions remain, “publication will be delayed until those concerns are resolved.”

Delayed Resolution

Last month the dean of the university’s graduate school, Abbas Ourmazd, said in an e-mail message that the institution would award Ms. Kuhn’s doctoral degree on the basis of having formulated a “‘first pass’ solution to the issues raised” by it. She had “clearly earned” the degree, he said, so the university would “not wait until all issues are finally resolved.”

In addition to problems of readability and dissemination, he said, there is the obvious one of copyright. He said Ms. Kuhn’s work posed challenges because, for example, it “includes video clips nested inside other multimedia ‘quotes’ from other ‘authors.’” In such cases, attempts at clear referencing of material are “not always so simple,” he said. The university is not permitted to help a student resolve such legal issues, but officials are sympathetic to the difficulty students face when they try to, he said. Students, he said, are “ill resourced to clarify such complex legal and commercial issues.”

Multimedia dissertations are not new, though they have been few and far between. One of the first was Christine Boese’s 1998 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute dissertation about the “Xenaverse,” the cyberworld of fandom for the television show, Xena: Warrior Princess (the work is stored at http://www.nutball .com/dissertation).

Authors of multimedia dissertations have found various ways to deal with the issues that officials at Milwaukee have been confronting. Way back in 1997, for her dissertation at the University of Virginia, Constanze M. Witt, now a lecturer in classics at the University of Texas at Austin, used a multimedia format to support her arguments about the nature of early Celtic art.

“I actually didn’t have many problems with acceptance, as the time was ripe,” she says. The “nonlinearity” of hypertext suited her subject, she says. Celtic art, she explains, is “curvilinear; it’s very hard to follow what is background and what is foreground. Many images don’t have a beginning and an end; they twist and turn on themselves.”

With all that, she says, to use a linear medium would be to impose a “post-Renaissance, four-square way of thinking,” inherited from Roman and Greek conceptions of art, onto her Celtic material.

Her nonstandard format did pass muster — although, she says, “the margins lady was upset because she couldn’t wield her ruler.”

But permissions did pose problems. Some museums refused to allow Ms. Witt to reproduce images she wished to include, or allowed her to include only low-resolution versions. But she skirted those issues and used some images without permission, she says, by not making the dissertation publicly available, “although I do have an innocuous Web-site version.” On the Web, she includes low-resolution versions, with permission, of the images she had wished to run in high-resolution mode.

She has not sought to register her work with University Microfilms.

At her current institution, doctoral candidates are required to submit their dissertations electronically. But “the dissertations aren’t hypertextual, at all,” she says, noting that they must be designed to print out like book pages and submitted as files converted to Adobe’s Portable Document Format, or PDF.

Mr. Stein, of USC, suspects that the full-fledged advent of the digital dissertation is still a ways off. “Everybody is looking at everybody else, and saying, ‘You go first,’” he says. “You’re going to see a lot of that for a while.”

http://chronicle.com

Section: Information Technology
Volume 52, Issue 34, Page A41

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

Published in conference proceedings: New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2000. 232-233.

At this same conference, I also presented the following material in a poster session:

• Download “Adventures in Alternative Hypertext Structuring: Research, Professional, and Classroom Uses”
• Download “Making a Successful Case for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation” ACM offprint

Find this article in its original location here.

Making a Successful Case for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation

Christine Boese, Department of English
Clemson University, Clemson, SC USA  29634

ABSTRACT

In August, 1998 the first hypertextual dissertation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was accepted (http://www.nutball.com/dissertation),  a case study applying methods of rhetorical analysis and cultural critique to the online phenomenon called the “Xenaverse,” the cyberspaces devoted to the cult following of the syndicated television program Xena, Warrior Princess. The hypertextual research site, a vital online culture, seemed to demand a new kind of scholarship to describe and analyze it. Still, there were many hurdles to getting such an unorthodox presentation form accepted by the dissertation committee and the Graduate School.

This paper summarizes a few of the justifying arguments that led to the successful acceptance this dissertation, a hypertext that could not be reproduced in any way on paper. In showing how one case for a hypertextual dissertation was successfully argued, I hope to help other scholars make similar cases at other institutions, perhaps leading to further debate on the ways arguments and epistemologies will be defined in the future.

KEYWORDS: hypertext dissertation electronic scholarship online cultural studies library archives University Microfilms graduate school Xenaverse Xena

INTRODUCTION

There are good and bad reasons for wanting to attempt a hypertextual dissertation. An attempt at hypertextual scholarship should not be motivated by a gratuitous desire to find any excuse to hypertextualize an argument. David Kolb, in a number of his works [1][2] has raised important reservations about hypertextual forms of academic arguments, especially because linearity and coherence have often been seen as essential features of good arguments. Some argue that dissertations are by definition linear, and therefore something that is nonlinear cannot actually be a dissertation. I agree that dissertations must present an argument, but I remain unconvinced that arguments are essentially defined by their linearity. The field of rhetoric in particular shows us how most arguments that strive for linearity are not fully linear, and are instead dependent on enthymemes and other rhetorical figures and stances.

Meanwhile, some of us are in search of truths that don’t proceed linearly, that build a persuasive case by accumulation and reiteration, by inviting users to make their own connections and to actively construct truths from extensive archives and linked appendices.

However, the best reason for attempting a hypertextual dissertation is that the content of the research demands it. In the case of the cyberspace-based virtual world called the “Xenaverse,” an ethnographic study could take into account the hypertextual virtual culture created, describe it on its own terms, and then circle back and analyze the findings. The dissertation could contain both detailed description and critical rhetorical analysis, cross-linked and tied directly to the sites of the study’s co-participants. With this in mind I began the project, The Ballad of the Internet Nutball: Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins of the Margins to the Mainstream in the Xenaverse (http://www.nutball.com/dissertation).

WHAT FORM SHOULD IT TAKE?

How do I effectively report back on my research? How much
hypertextual knowledge and understanding would be lost in the
translation from webbed text to linear print text? The data consist of
multiple media strung across a web of links. The shape of the
dissertation content, both my own description and analysis and the many
voices of the people who live in my data, is primarily
non-hierarchical, decentering, marginal, polyvocal, multi-threaded, in
short, hypertextual. My goal was to move outside of the standard,
linear, centered form for a dissertation argument in order to devise an
alternative, perhaps more expansive, form for my persuasion in
hypertext. The hypertextual performance of this dissertation was merely
one step toward testing whether nonlinear arguments can be made in
hypertext, a challenge put forth by David Kolb in “Socrates in the
Labyrinth” [1] and “Discourse Across Links” [2].

If closure doesn’t always happen down a predetermined route, how do
I judge, how does my dissertation committee judge, whether I have
successfully completed and defended a dissertation that exists in
native hypertextual, multimedia form? Perhaps what I am making is more
of a hypertextual creative work of considerable substance, a
performance, a representation of a dissertation in experimental form.
However, this does not mean that my argument cannot be effective and
persuasive, and thus still meet the institutional requirements for
dissertations.

This project sought to link and merge with the webbed Xenaverse
culture in cyberspace. To learn about the Xenaverse, the power
relationships and constructions of authority within it, the user is
invited to step through a scholarly portal, to become immersed,
explore, both within and beyond the blurred boundaries of the
dissertation and into the Xenaverse itself. I made a choice to match
the form of my dissertation to the webbed environment of the Xenaverse,
in order not to lose the hypertextual knowledge and understanding that
could perhaps be gained from associational linking and dialogic
interactions between frames and windows.

INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS

With a dissertation I couldn’t be as free form as I might have been
in a fictional piece. If I had been more experimental, I would have run
the risk that the dissertation would have been unacceptable to the
Graduate School. My committee was receptive to experimentation, and
eventually voiced concern that I had been too conservative in
structuring the interface. However, I had to find a way to ensure that
the major argumentative points of my study were communicated through
multiple paths and navigational styles. I attempted to do that by
building redundancies into the content for a holistic effect. I also
attempted to build recursiveness into the link structure, so that
patterns of links would lead the reader back around and around until
unexplored sectors will almost inevitably be reached.

There were also some key negotiations made between the chair of my
doctoral committee, the Graduate School, and myself. Our research
indicated that University Microfilms had been accepting CD-ROM
dissertations since 1996, and it was heralded as a sign of progress in
the “Information Technology” section of The Chronicle of Higher
Education [3].

Upon contacting University Microfilms in 1998, however, I was told
that the electronic submission policy only applied to Portable Document
Format (.pdf) files, in other words, facsimile document files that
faithfully reproduced images of a paper dissertation. The person I
spoke with had no idea what University Microfilms would do with the
multimedia dissertations written about in the Chronicle article. These
were described as traditional linear dissertations with extensive
support media (e.g. video clips, photographs). There was no mention of
what would be done with the nonlinear structuring of hypertextual
forms. Eventually I came upon the same difficulty with the Rensselaer
Polytechnic library: lack of a digital archive.

I had developed an interface of dialogically interacting frames and
windows forming a composite text. In the first round of negotiations
over a “no paper” dissertation with the Graduate School, I was asked if
I could just print out all the Mainscreens, negating the effects of
nonlinear linking. My advisor, David Porush, and I had decided early on
that if an electronic dissertation could be reproduced on paper, then
there was really no compelling reason for it to be in electronic form
at all.

To its credit, the Rensselaer Graduate School was remarkably
open-minded. I proposed a small introductory text that would contain
instructions on how to install the CD-ROM or access the Web site. This
small amount of paper could be hardcover bound, with an envelope
affixed to the inside back cover for the CD-ROM. Finally a compromise
was reached. The Graduate School required that each dissertation have
four sections, an Abstract, an Introduction, a Conclusion, and a
Bibliography. In the end, the paper component totaled 73 pages.

The greatest obstacle to the archival longevity of the project had
to do with the Institute’s lack of stable, long-term digital storage
and access space on the Internet. I needed a permanent Uniform Resource
Location (URL) that I could publish in the paper archives. I had to
take it upon myself to provide a stable and permanent URL for the site,
paying to register a DNS as well as the monthly server space rental.

CONCLUSION

I hope that other scholars can add to the development of such cases
like this, opening the door for a more firmly established genre of
hypertextual scholarship. We also must consider the traditional and
not-so-traditional institutional constraints for archiving and
referencing such work, and advocate changing the storage system
assumptions made by University Microfilms and library archives in
making hypertextual electronic scholarship available to other
researchers. Electronic dissertations that are exact representations of
paged paper texts show little justifying reason for being created and
stored in digital form, other than the expedience of saving library
shelf space. Some scholars are using digital materials to archive
multimedia rich data appendices, but the form of their argument remains
primarily conventional. There is much more work to be done.

REFERENCES

1. Kolb, D., Socrates in the Labyrinth, in Hyper/Text/Theory, G.P.
Landow, Editor. 1994, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD.

2. Kolb, D., Discourse across Links, in Philosophical Perspectives on
Computer-Mediated Communication, C. Ess, Editor. 1996, State University
of New York Press: Albany, NY. p. 15-26.

3. Mangan, K.S., CD-ROM Dissertations: Universities consider whether new format is appropriate
way to present research. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1996 (March
8, 1996): p. A15-A19.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/06/weekinreview/ideas-trends-not-so-brave-new-world-sci-fi-tv-runs-aground.html

(Author’s Note: the following article is archived here for fair use and historical documentation purposes only, to protect key records that are disappearing from their original locations on the web, as many print media properties are cavalier about maintaining archives and permalinks in times of cutbacks and publications going out of business.)

IDEAS & TRENDS

Not-So-Brave New World: Sci-Fi TV Runs Aground

By J. D. BIERSDORFER

Click to view larger image of dissertation interface design schema

Click to view PDF of Dissertation Site Flow