Overview of Project

This group hypertext project grew out of discussions we held in my fourth year honours seminar "Modes of Communication: From orality to literacy to the electronic era." in the Communication Studies program at York University. The interest in the possibility of cyberspace genres emerged as a natural topic that would allow the 25 fourth year students (some from the Communication Studies Program and some from the Information Technology Program) to work individually (or in pairs) on a selection of possible cybergenres.

Last year's group hypertext project in this course was ostensibly on "Reading Television". Students picked shows and applied various theories to the shows in order to analyse the process of "reading" television. But the real purpose of the assignment was to begin to develop a rhetoric of "academic" hypertext. We had many discussions about style, format, links, graphics, etc. in an attempt to look at how best to construct hypertext so that it might echo where appropriate, but not be overwhelmed by, ideas of print-based rhetoric, and what we needed to exploit in this new medium. That conversation has continued this year, and while the content of the project has changed (now we're looking at whether we can differentiate genres on the Web), the real goal of this assignment continues to be an exploration of the potential for hypertext to work in academic settings.

While individual authors found texts relevant to their cybergenres which are linked and cited in their individual nodes, we all considered core texts on genre and cybergenres. We also developed a provisional taxonomy of cybergenres and worked from a common set of theories.

While we have not come to any definite conclusions about the existence of distinct cybergenres--in fact, it looks like a lot more overlap than originally imagined--we have constructed a web of links and nodes on this topic in a truly collaborative effort realizing one of the great advantages of hypertext.

Mary-Louise Craven
Associate Professor,
Communication Studies Program, Social Science Division,
York University, Toronto