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Thinking through Worlds Fair: evolutionary rhetoric
Pergamon Computers and Composition 18 (2001) 163–176
Thinking through Worlds Fair: evolutionary rhetoric M.A. Syverson* Computer Writing and Research Lab, University of Texas at Austin, PAS 3, Austin, TX 78712, USA
Abstract Instructors may hesitate to incorporate visual rhetoric into their composition courses because of their own lack of training or experience in visual arts or graphic design. They may also be uncertain about what kinds of demands visual rhetoric will make of students, and what kinds of learning are involved. One of the best ways for composition instructors to gain an understanding about the challenges and potential of incorporating visual rhetoric into a course is to develop their own project. This article describes the creation of Worlds Fair, a project that evolved over several years from a sketchy short-story idea into a full-blown Web-based multimedia project with over 80 contributors, and proved to be an education in incorporating visual rhetoric into composition pedagogy. © 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Cognition; Design; Multimedia; Visual rhetoric
1. Introduction One of the great difficulties I have faced in incorporating visual rhetoric into my composition teaching is my lack of expertise and experience. I have been aided by some early art training and by reading widely in topics such as information architecture, design, typography, architecture, and the manuals and tutorials associated with graphics programs such as MetaCreations PAINTER and Adobe PHOTOSHOP. But, the most useful and engaging learning I’ve done has been the result of trying to develop my project relying on a strong visual component. Worlds Fair (currently online at http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃syverson/ worldsfair) confronted me with issues ranging from the technical to the pedagogical to the rhetorical and esthetic. For all its frustrations and its inadequacies, it has demonstrated for me some unexpected dimensions of composing in new media. It has also given me deeper * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (M.A. Syverson). 8755-4615/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 8 7 5 5 - 4 6 1 5 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 4 7 - 0
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insights into the challenges students face in developing projects that require the integration of graphical and textual elements. I thought an explanation of the process of thinking through this large-scale project might perhaps benefit others teaching aspects of visual rhetoric in their classes. Worlds Fair started as a text-based story idea I meant to work out for myself, rather than a graphical or pedagogical project, but it evolved into an extended exercise in rhetorical design and exploratory pedagogy. The title of this piece, “Thinking Through Worlds Fair,” refers both to the process by which I thought about how to design the project, and also the way I used the project itself to think with.
2. Invention: the prewriting backstory I had been struck, a few years back, by a rash of science fiction films such as Mars Attacks, the Star Wars and Star Trek series, and Battlestar Galactica, all based on combat in space. It seemed to me that beings of superior intelligence capable of intergalactic travel would probably have evolved beyond violence. In fact, it seemed much more likely that their superior intelligence would result from sharing knowledge with beings from other worlds, rather than through warring with them. I was struck immediately with a visual image of a huge convention hall filled with exhibits, like a giant science fair, with beings from all over the universe milling around, making presentations at their exhibits, chatting with visitors. It seemed like a good idea for a short story, and I started to think about how the story might unfold. Although the Worlds Fair had first occurred to me as a film image, I initially assumed I’d be presenting the story in text. But, first the story elements had to be worked out. Of course, we would have to get some Earth folks to the Worlds Fair, which would naturally be situated in a galaxy far, far away. If the story were to be set in the immediate present or near-future, it seemed to me that, realistically speaking, the crew would only be able to get as far as the Earth’s moon. Intergalactic transport for the Earth’s crew and exhibits would have to be arranged from the moon by more advanced beings. How? My next thought was also a visual image of an invitation to the Worlds Fair delivered to the White House from beyond the galaxy. How did it get there? That’s their science, not ours, I thought. I realized that the story would need to have its own internal story logic. Earth and its inhabitants would be constrained by our logic and science; beings from other galaxies, however, could very well have different methods, practices, and effects— even different physics. I started to think about what exhibits these intergalactic exhibitors might provide for the knowledge fair. This part of the nascent short story was fun, as I imagined how more highly evolved beings might live and work. There was a problem, though. The whole structure was starting to seem too big for a short story. I wanted to include the debate among the President’s advisors about whether to launch the mission, extensive descriptions of exhibits, the reactions of the American crew members and their experiences at the Worlds Fair, their discussions and arguments with each other and their return to earth. At that point, I despaired of writing what was beginning to seem like a novel, when I realized that what the project also needed was graphics, animation, sound, life. The story began to explode beyond the confines of text, and demanded multimedia; it seemed that it might be more suited for the Web. But,
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by this point I had decided that it was too much to take on and set it aside. Besides, I thought, I really don’t have the expertise to take on a large multimedia project.
3. Planning and drafting: pedagogy of the imagination Time passed, but I still couldn’t get Worlds Fair out of my mind. I was accumulating a folder of odd notes written before I went to sleep or while waiting at the dentist’s office. The notes gave cryptic clues to intergalactic exhibits (“harmonium, a process for harmonious development,” “some kind of energy field that converges to form objects as needed”) or to crew members (“surgeon brings examples of ICU and neonatal stuff, but visitors are puzzled, they do surgery by noninvasive light, reorganizing matter. Surgeon decides they are not scientists”; “military officer commits suicide on returning to the Moon,” and so on). Some notes focused on activity at Worlds Fair (“crew strolls around while exhibits are being set up, trying to understand what they represent”; “President’s son brings a Frisbee®, turns out to be the unexpected hit of the Fair”). The concept wasn’t going away, and I still couldn’t decide what to do about it, when it occurred to me to turn it into a large-scale collaborative project. Others might contribute exhibits to the Worlds Fair and participate in discussions about it. In that way, it could unfold over time and cover a great deal more ground. In fact, I thought, it might be a good frame for the projects students were developing in my information architecture class. Although I did not realize it then, this plan provided its own set of constraints and its own catalyst for new ways of thinking about the project. My job would become more suggestive and less authorial; the project would serve as a laboratory for student practice as well as a gallery of their work. Students could work individually or in teams. Message forums could be incorporated to promote interaction and collaboration. The project could continue beyond the semester and include other classes or even other interested individuals as well, inside or outside the university. This new direction generated the energy for the initial Web development in the winter of 1996.
4. Crafting the experience: narration and the Web Everything I had been teaching students about Web design and the presentation of information was challenged in this project. I wanted readers to be drawn into a compelling and mysterious story, yet I also wanted a coherent way to present information that would continue to expand. I wanted a high level of interaction in constructing the project, yet I wanted to provide enough structure so that students would not be completely overwhelmed. And, I had ideas of my own that I wanted to share. But, there were problems. Oh boy, were there problems. The narrative sequence is critical in a story, for example, but how can time sequence be negotiated on a massively hyperlinked Web site? Readers expect clear navigation clues and some global sense of the whole Web site, but those features work against the mystery that draws people into a story. And, of course, as with all collaborative projects, I
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worried—what if we build it and nobody comes? A Worlds Fair with only a smattering of exhibits would be a sad affair. I began designing some pages. The space theme was in the back of my mind as I went about my normal activities of reading email and browsing on the Web. One of the online newsletters I do read carefully is Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater, and at the bottom of one message was an incidental URL for an image from NASA called “Birth of a Star.” This has by now became a famous image, but at the time it was quite new. I clicked on the link to check it out and was overwhelmed by the stunning color, dynamics, and beauty of the image. I wanted to use it as the opening image for Worlds Fair, so I downloaded the image at the various resolutions and sizes available at the Web site. But the file size of the image was huge; the file size would need to be reduced to use it on a Web site that would be accessed by modem. I first tried the quick and simple approach of opening it in Lemke Software’s GRAPHICCONVERTER, scaling the size down, and minimizing the colors. But, there were so many colors and so much detail that the file size was not reduced appreciably. So I moved into the more sophisticated Adobe PHOTOSHOP for further reductions, but still the image file was huge, and I couldn’t risk having it tile (repeat over and over again instead of appearing as one solid image) on a large monitor. In every case, to get the file down to a reasonable size resulted in unacceptable levels of quality or size (I’ve since incorporated it into a porthole view out of a space shuttle). Still, wrestling with the image spurred my thoughts about using a starfield for the background of the opening page. I thought I’d have to find a smaller image and allow it to tile for the background. That way, too, it would better adapt to different size monitors. I searched the NASA site and also the image archives at Webseek and finally found an example with enough complexity to be interesting when tiled as a background, yet with a reasonably small file size. Superimposed on this background would be the title, but I was not yet clear how to represent the title or how much information I should provide for readers. I wanted to develop an opening sequence to draw readers into the story, engage them in debate about the mission, then invite their participation. This opening sequence would lead directly to the Worlds Fair exhibits. The opening sequence features a simple title page, which offers very little information: “Worlds Fair, a collaborative composition.” At this point I shifted from thinking primarily in text mode to “thinking in Web.” To give the opening screen a bit more interest, I decided to animate the title, not through motion, but through color change. The color change echoes an effect used later in the story in the invitation to Worlds Fair. So in the beginning, the title cycles through a spectrum of colors. (See Figure 1 for a plain-text version of the opening image.) There is no indication of what to do next, but I reasoned that by now readers had enough experience with the Web to think “point and click—something will happen.” When they do, readers are drawn into a linear sequence of pages with no navigation cues and no sense of what comes next. Originally, the second page was completely black; the only effect was the sound of a ringing phone to create the mood of an urgent phone call in the middle of the night. My colleague John Slatin pointed out that although this page works for visually impaired readers, it would be lost on hearing-impaired readers. To address this need, while still building suspense, I added an animation of a telephone with a cone of light, as if on a bedside table. The next page shows only what appears to be a time readout from a digital clock—3:15 a.m. The reader is then summoned to the White House for an urgent meeting.
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Fig. 1. Worlds Fair opening image.
This minimally interactive narrative sequence sets the context for the project to come and leads directly to the Worlds Fair invitation (see Figure 2) from beyond the galaxy, which has mysteriously appeared in the White House. Because the invitation itself represents a critical
Fig. 2. Invitation to the intergalactic Worlds Fair.
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shift in the project’s development, it’s worth looking closely at the process of bringing together existing experience, technological constraints, problem-solving, and imagination to create it. 4.1. The invitation The intergalactic invitation to the Worlds Fair posed interesting challenges. In terms of the story development, the visual representation had to frame the invitation in an intriguing and compelling way, yet it had to retain a bit of mystery: Was it all a hoax, a stunt of some kind? It also needed to have features that explicitly marked it as extraterrestrial. I realized that the affordances of the Web could provide a representation that simply could not be achieved in conventional print media: the message gradually appears as you are reading it, and at the same time it also changes color. Yet, the invitation appears in the story as a print document. How could this be accomplished? I finally decided to rough out the idea as an animation, using a shareware application called GIFBUILDER. I tinkered with fonts and colors and timing until it looked reasonable, then tested it online over a modem connection as well as a high-speed connection, using Microsoft INTERNET EXPLORER and Netscape COMMUNICATOR and both Macintosh and PC/IBM platforms. When I was satisfied with it, I submitted it to the most rigorous test I could imagine: my tech-savvy teenager, a film and computer artist. He pronounced the effects “cheesy,” and suggested that the project ought to be developed in a high-end animation package. Naturally, this critical response provoked a crisis. On the one hand, I wanted the project to showcase the powerful potential of the Web with cutting-edge effects. My conflicting desire was to show students that it is possible to create compelling compositions with readily accessible, no-cost, or low-cost software. There is a constant ramping up of the technological ante that gives students the impression that you need to have the latest, fastest machines, the newest high-end software, the fastest net connection, the latest browser plug-ins if you want to design compelling multimedia projects. For many students this is not a realistic goal. The financial costs, the steep learning curve, and the rapid pace of cutting-edge developments are prohibitive. At this critical moment, I made a decision that had implications for the entire project: Worlds Fair would model the possibilities inherent in easily accessible, cheap, or free applications and resources. From that point on I depended on online archives of freely available backgrounds, sounds, and graphics; on inexpensive shareware or freeware programs such as Lemke Software’s GRAPHICCONVERTER, GIFBUILDER, Claris HOME PAGE, and FETCH; on low-bandwidth Internet connections; and on freely available javascripts. I decided to model as many different features of Web design as I could: frames, tables, animations, sounds, and message forums. In the actual drafting phase, however, I just reached for whatever tools or features would provide the effect I wanted. 4.2. Interactivity With the main story launched, I faced the problem of engaging students as participants and contributors. They would be developing projects for the Worlds Fair exhibition, but first they
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needed some connection to the story. I wanted to get them involved early, so that they could be thinking about their projects as integral to the story. And, how would the actual assignment be made? It seems obvious now, but it represented a real puzzle. I decided to involve them early in the original debate about the invitation, first presented as a page of dialogue among the President’s advisors. I could have engaged students in a class discussion, but I wanted to be sure that every student had a chance to respond, so I set up a message forum designed to advise the President: Should the Worlds Fair mission be undertaken? Students took on a role (sixth-grade teacher, chief of military operations, physician, artist, and so on) as a basis for their response. This was not an extended writing assignment, but the first step of their participation in the project. In the next step, they were informed via email message that the President had issued a call for proposals to create exhibits for the mission. These proposals were, in fact, going to be the students’ project proposals. To lend authenticity to the call for proposals, I adapted an actual call issued by the Computer Aided Education and Training Initiative sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) several years ago, complete with its impenetrable governmental jargon. I reworked the specifications to match the project requirements, clarified the language, and set deadlines for proposals, drafts, and final exhibits. I also included a link to a set of criteria for reviewing projects that could be used by writers, peer readers, and the program director (me), who had the final authority to approve projects, recommend revisions, and suggest collaborators. I wanted to give Worlds Fair’s diverse array of documents the appearance of coming from different sources, yet I also wanted to address students directly. Javascripts can be used to insert the actual date into documents addressed to the reader to lend immediacy and currency to the project. It is more difficult, however, to provide a sense of age and physicality for electronic documents. The email message that assigned the project to students appeared on a wood-grain background suggesting a desk, with a humorous twist. Javascript ants run over the page where a half-eaten chocolate-chip cookie serves as a paperweight. The ants will follow the cursor, but if you click on one, it disappears, only to be replaced by another coming in from the edge (see Figure 3 for a text-only view of the page). The call for proposals page sported a graphic of a sticky note stuck on before passing the call along to the reader. On the proposal information packet I added a graphic of a coffee cup stain to give the impression that it had been knocked around the office for some time. These effects were readily available from clip art and public javascript archives. Once again I wanted to increase students’ engagement with the project, and also encourage them to collaborate and to learn from each other. I established a second forum for posting proposals, with the requirement that students post their own proposals and respond to two others. As the ARCA1 “Program Manager,” I issued the final approval for each project on the forum, with suggestions about focusing the topic, teaming up with other similar proposals, and so on. In rare cases, I rejected a proposal as inappropriate for the mission, suggesting a resubmission. The message forum was ideal for this purpose. It allowed students to read and respond to each other’s proposals; they benefited from seeing other proposals and they also discovered ways to help each other or collaborate on their projects.
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Fig. 3. The hazards of cookies.
4.3. The exhibits I didn’t want this project to be limited to one class. In fact, I wanted to encourage people outside the University of Texas at Austin and even outside the academy to participate as well, either in groups or as individuals. But I could see that as the project scaled up, it would present a new dilemma: How could all these projects be represented without overwhelming visitors? One possibility was to group projects by topic: There might be an art area, for example, a history area, an education area, a medical area. This idea had a lot of appeal, because over time students could develop coherent environments by building on each other’s work. These topical neighborhoods would allow visitors to browse among areas of interest. On the other hand, it would necessarily create distinctions that would be difficult to draw: Should a virtual reality environment appear in the art area or in the technology area? Even with the possibility of hyperlinking, the results could be unsatisfying. Ultimately, for better or worse, I decided to create exhibit halls for each class (see Figure 4), each hall complete with a message forum set up as a cafe´, where people could comment on the exhibit hall as a whole or on particular exhibits. In this way, the class identity was preserved, and students could locate their classmates’ work easily. I divided the exhibit halls into two main sections: exhibits from Earth and exhibits from other galaxies. I hoped this would also encourage contributions from those instructors or
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Fig. 4. Exhibit hall for an Information Architecture class.
interested individuals teaching or creating science fiction or fantasy. I wrote some pages to provide background information about the project and suggest how others could be involved. For students, outside contributors, and other audiences, it seemed it would be helpful to have a navigation aid. I used several clever table tricks first mentioned in Darrell Sano’s (1996) Designing Large-Scale Web Sites to create the image of a book with a table of contents and a list of front matter, including pages for credits and lists of participants (see Figure 5). By fall semester 1999, over 80 students had contributed to Worlds Fair. 4.4. Classified documents The real idea underlying the Worlds Fair Project is that we will not get better futures unless we are actively engaged in imagining the possibilities. To imagine new possibilities, we need to break out of assumptions and habits of mind that limit our thinking. Science fiction has long been an important realm of imagination that can be freed of the constraints of our common-sense understandings about the physical and social world. I wondered how to convey to students the liberatory quality of mind that can lead to genuinely new solutions, expansions, and developments that have real potential for building a better future. Mean-
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Fig. 5. “Table of Contents” for Worlds Fair.
while, I could not figure out how to give students a sense of the experience of the Worlds Fair itself, of the exhibits from other galaxies and their representations of extraterrestrial knowledge, of the contact with beings with advanced wisdom and understanding. Actually, in my original story idea the motive behind the Worlds Fair invitation was not, as it turns out, entirely benign: There was great concern in other galaxies about the precarious situation on Earth and human potential to destroy a viable and valuable life-supporting ecosystem. The invitation was intended to bootstrap humans’ development and commit them to changes that would ensure and protect Earth’s future. But, it was not clear to me how to represent the advanced knowledge of these beings and their concern, or how to integrate it into the Web project. About two years after the initial development of Worlds Fair, the idea of a set of “classified documents” occurred to me. These documents would represent fragments of notes and journals kept by the American crew visiting Worlds Fair, and thus would have to have been sent back from the future. How were they found? I decided they must have appeared as bona fides with the initial invitation. The classified documents ultimately turned into a major section of the project. To create the mood of a classified area, I used a javascript that asks the reader for identification, then inserts the reader’s name into a “cover letter” sporting a NASA logo on the letterhead and today’s date, granting the reader permission to access the documents designated “for your eyes only.” What would these documents consist of, and who would have authored them? I wanted a diverse set of observations and reactions to encounters with both extraterrestrial beings and their exhibits. Some candidates began to materialize: the President’s son, the military chief of operations, a doctor, a biologist, and a physicist. For this part of the project, it was important to give a timeless feeling to these fragmented, paradoxically aged documents coming from the future. Consequently, even the dates are nebulous. A spiral notebook image was used for one background, and I created a graph paper background for the physicist and a recycled-looking tan paper for the military captain. In several cases, I used handwriting fonts to create the text of the document in GRAPHICCONVERTER, saving them as graphics with transparent backgrounds to reduce the file size. In other cases I used conventional fonts in various colors, with graphics for signatures. It was a challenge to create documents that featured different rhetorical styles and voices to represent
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Fig. 6. Journal fragment from Jeremy, the President’s son.
different composers of these pieces, but it was an equal challenge to create different visual representations of each fragment to match the character who presumably wrote it. The journal of the President’s son, for example, complains about having his younger brother Max along. But he speaks glowingly about the exhibits he’s seen. As a teasing gesture, I added four boxes representing photos or drawings he had attached to his journal. Across each box is a large graphic censoring the exhibit in a red stencil font that reads “PERMISSION DENIED” (see Figure 6). Each of these fragments represents a glimpse of an idea about another version of reality. The virtue of such fragmentary evidence (a page of a journal here, a memo there) is that the actual representations of the exhibits do not need to be fully documented. The suggestive hints are intended to intrigue and provoke the imagination, not present a full-blown vision.
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In this way, too, the document collection can continue to be expanded. Furthermore, participants could suggest their own contributions to the classified documents. The most recent addition I’ve made is a transcript of a conversation between a professor of modern languages and a being whose home language lacks nouns and is instead based primarily on verbs.
5. Conclusion This project has taught me a great deal about the integration of imagination, rhetoric, esthetics, hardware, software, networks, pedagogy, and design architecture. The ongoing, open-ended development process is unlike anything I’ve attempted in conventional publication. There are few limits to the range of the project. For example, in the past year I’ve added new javascripts for the moving stars on the opening screen, sound effects, and theme music for the title sequence. When Swatch, a Swiss watch manufacturer, introduced the concept of Internet time, which divides the day into 1,000 numbered units that determine the time all over the world without regard to time zones, I added an “@time” clock to the classified documents. When articles on quantum computing began appearing in science news, it was a simple matter to incorporate a reference to the concepts into the mathematician’s memo to the President. Students’ responses to the project have been positive; they become seriously engaged in the discussions and the exhibits. Still, real challenges remain: For example, I have not had enough time to encourage outside participation, which would contribute to the scope and depth of the project. As the project scales up, coherence and navigability will be increasingly important for readers. I have not yet been able to give serious attention to accessibility issues. Still, I am pleased with the steady emergence of the core concepts of Worlds Fair, and it continues to spark my imagination. How will it develop next? I’m thinking seriously about layers, interactive behaviors, databases, and other features that can enrich and expand the experience of participants and visitors. Bruno Latour (1986) called this process “thinking with the eyes and hands,” suggesting that our technological applications are no longer simply tools that we use to implement our ideas, but become the very media of thought itself. The major challenge for those instructors who want to incorporate visual rhetoric into our composition courses is how to convey this model of thinking with the media, rather than depending on a model of thinking first and then representing our ideas in the media. This necessary transformation in our thinking is nowhere more apparent than in Edwin Hutchins’ (1995) Cognition in the Wild. His description of the coordination of tasks, cognitive artifacts, perception, knowledge, and action in navigation is a model of a cognitive ecology in which it is clear that the cognitive processes are distributed throughout the system. The activity of navigation is a process of thinking through the tools, charts, records, and social structures, not a simple question of applying them. We might also be well-served by concepts drawn from architecture, which has a long tradition of coordinating materials, concepts, esthetics, technical knowledge, and social interaction. Christopher Alexander for example, described architecture not in terms of elements such as doors and walls, but as a set of “pattern languages” based on relationships
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that support “recurring patterns of activity” (Alexander, 1964, 1979; Alexander, Ishikawa, & Silverstein, 1977). This is an apt description that applies equally to online compositions and to pedagogical environments as well. We are guided in our teaching by pattern languages (for example, workshops on drafts, message forums, or class email lists) that support recurring patterns of activity (such as interaction and conversation between students, ongoing improvements in a piece of writing, and so on). These pattern languages are both cultural and personal; they give shape to learning environments even in new and unfamiliar media. We can learn a great deal about thinking through these media if we are willing to pay attention to our own composing processes. Visual rhetoric, too, has its pattern languages that we can discover not only through formal training, but also through our own inquiry and experimentation. In this way we can continue to expand our capacity to develop teaching and learning environments that push well beyond our original training and expertise.
Notes 1. This was a made-up acronym spelled out in the mock request for proposals as “Advanced Research and Communication Agency.” It’s a play on ARPA (now DARPA).
Margaret Syverson is the director of the Computer Writing and Research Lab and an associate professor in the Division of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas–Austin. Her book, The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition, was recently published by Southern Illinois Press. She is president of the Board of Directors for the Center for Language in Learning, and editor of Computers and Composition Online (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃ccjrnl). Her work with the Online Learning Record, a portfolio-based assessment system (www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃syverson/olr), has been supported through a CAETI grant and a Carnegie Scholars Award. Additional information about Syverson may be found at 具http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃syverson典.
References Alexander, Christopher. (1964). Notes on the synthesis of form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alexander, Christopher. (1979). The timeless way of building. New York: Oxford University Press. Alexander, Christopher, Ishikawa, Sara, & Silverstein, Murray. (1977). A pattern language. New York: Oxford University Press. Hutchins, Edwin. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. (1986). Visualization and cognition: thinking with the eyes and hands. In Knowledge and society: studies in the sociology of culture past and present, 6, 1– 40. Sano, Darrell. (1996). Designing large-scale Web sites: a visual design methodology. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
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URLs for resources mentioned Hall, Mike. Ants javascripts. Available: ⬍http://javascript.internet.com⬎. Another excellent javascript archive is ⬍http://www.javascripts.com⬎. Information about Phil Agre’s newsletter, Red Rock Eater, can be found at ⬍http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu.edu/people/ pagre/rre.html⬎. Opening theme music for Worlds Fair is “Dragon Dance,” from the album Sophistication, by Galbatron. See ⬍http://www.mp3.com/Galbatron⬎. Other resources used for the Worlds Fair project are listed at ⬍http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃syverson/ worldsfair/credits.html⬎. Worlds Fair contributors are listed at ⬍http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃syverson/worldsfair/participants.html⬎.
Thinking through Worlds Fair: evolutionary rhetoric M.A. Syverson* Computer Writing and Research Lab, University of Texas at Austin, PAS 3, Austin, TX 78712, USA
Abstract Instructors may hesitate to incorporate visual rhetoric into their composition courses because of their own lack of training or experience in visual arts or graphic design. They may also be uncertain about what kinds of demands visual rhetoric will make of students, and what kinds of learning are involved. One of the best ways for composition instructors to gain an understanding about the challenges and potential of incorporating visual rhetoric into a course is to develop their own project. This article describes the creation of Worlds Fair, a project that evolved over several years from a sketchy short-story idea into a full-blown Web-based multimedia project with over 80 contributors, and proved to be an education in incorporating visual rhetoric into composition pedagogy. © 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Cognition; Design; Multimedia; Visual rhetoric
1. Introduction One of the great difficulties I have faced in incorporating visual rhetoric into my composition teaching is my lack of expertise and experience. I have been aided by some early art training and by reading widely in topics such as information architecture, design, typography, architecture, and the manuals and tutorials associated with graphics programs such as MetaCreations PAINTER and Adobe PHOTOSHOP. But, the most useful and engaging learning I’ve done has been the result of trying to develop my project relying on a strong visual component. Worlds Fair (currently online at http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃syverson/ worldsfair) confronted me with issues ranging from the technical to the pedagogical to the rhetorical and esthetic. For all its frustrations and its inadequacies, it has demonstrated for me some unexpected dimensions of composing in new media. It has also given me deeper * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (M.A. Syverson). 8755-4615/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 8 7 5 5 - 4 6 1 5 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 4 7 - 0
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insights into the challenges students face in developing projects that require the integration of graphical and textual elements. I thought an explanation of the process of thinking through this large-scale project might perhaps benefit others teaching aspects of visual rhetoric in their classes. Worlds Fair started as a text-based story idea I meant to work out for myself, rather than a graphical or pedagogical project, but it evolved into an extended exercise in rhetorical design and exploratory pedagogy. The title of this piece, “Thinking Through Worlds Fair,” refers both to the process by which I thought about how to design the project, and also the way I used the project itself to think with.
2. Invention: the prewriting backstory I had been struck, a few years back, by a rash of science fiction films such as Mars Attacks, the Star Wars and Star Trek series, and Battlestar Galactica, all based on combat in space. It seemed to me that beings of superior intelligence capable of intergalactic travel would probably have evolved beyond violence. In fact, it seemed much more likely that their superior intelligence would result from sharing knowledge with beings from other worlds, rather than through warring with them. I was struck immediately with a visual image of a huge convention hall filled with exhibits, like a giant science fair, with beings from all over the universe milling around, making presentations at their exhibits, chatting with visitors. It seemed like a good idea for a short story, and I started to think about how the story might unfold. Although the Worlds Fair had first occurred to me as a film image, I initially assumed I’d be presenting the story in text. But, first the story elements had to be worked out. Of course, we would have to get some Earth folks to the Worlds Fair, which would naturally be situated in a galaxy far, far away. If the story were to be set in the immediate present or near-future, it seemed to me that, realistically speaking, the crew would only be able to get as far as the Earth’s moon. Intergalactic transport for the Earth’s crew and exhibits would have to be arranged from the moon by more advanced beings. How? My next thought was also a visual image of an invitation to the Worlds Fair delivered to the White House from beyond the galaxy. How did it get there? That’s their science, not ours, I thought. I realized that the story would need to have its own internal story logic. Earth and its inhabitants would be constrained by our logic and science; beings from other galaxies, however, could very well have different methods, practices, and effects— even different physics. I started to think about what exhibits these intergalactic exhibitors might provide for the knowledge fair. This part of the nascent short story was fun, as I imagined how more highly evolved beings might live and work. There was a problem, though. The whole structure was starting to seem too big for a short story. I wanted to include the debate among the President’s advisors about whether to launch the mission, extensive descriptions of exhibits, the reactions of the American crew members and their experiences at the Worlds Fair, their discussions and arguments with each other and their return to earth. At that point, I despaired of writing what was beginning to seem like a novel, when I realized that what the project also needed was graphics, animation, sound, life. The story began to explode beyond the confines of text, and demanded multimedia; it seemed that it might be more suited for the Web. But,
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by this point I had decided that it was too much to take on and set it aside. Besides, I thought, I really don’t have the expertise to take on a large multimedia project.
3. Planning and drafting: pedagogy of the imagination Time passed, but I still couldn’t get Worlds Fair out of my mind. I was accumulating a folder of odd notes written before I went to sleep or while waiting at the dentist’s office. The notes gave cryptic clues to intergalactic exhibits (“harmonium, a process for harmonious development,” “some kind of energy field that converges to form objects as needed”) or to crew members (“surgeon brings examples of ICU and neonatal stuff, but visitors are puzzled, they do surgery by noninvasive light, reorganizing matter. Surgeon decides they are not scientists”; “military officer commits suicide on returning to the Moon,” and so on). Some notes focused on activity at Worlds Fair (“crew strolls around while exhibits are being set up, trying to understand what they represent”; “President’s son brings a Frisbee®, turns out to be the unexpected hit of the Fair”). The concept wasn’t going away, and I still couldn’t decide what to do about it, when it occurred to me to turn it into a large-scale collaborative project. Others might contribute exhibits to the Worlds Fair and participate in discussions about it. In that way, it could unfold over time and cover a great deal more ground. In fact, I thought, it might be a good frame for the projects students were developing in my information architecture class. Although I did not realize it then, this plan provided its own set of constraints and its own catalyst for new ways of thinking about the project. My job would become more suggestive and less authorial; the project would serve as a laboratory for student practice as well as a gallery of their work. Students could work individually or in teams. Message forums could be incorporated to promote interaction and collaboration. The project could continue beyond the semester and include other classes or even other interested individuals as well, inside or outside the university. This new direction generated the energy for the initial Web development in the winter of 1996.
4. Crafting the experience: narration and the Web Everything I had been teaching students about Web design and the presentation of information was challenged in this project. I wanted readers to be drawn into a compelling and mysterious story, yet I also wanted a coherent way to present information that would continue to expand. I wanted a high level of interaction in constructing the project, yet I wanted to provide enough structure so that students would not be completely overwhelmed. And, I had ideas of my own that I wanted to share. But, there were problems. Oh boy, were there problems. The narrative sequence is critical in a story, for example, but how can time sequence be negotiated on a massively hyperlinked Web site? Readers expect clear navigation clues and some global sense of the whole Web site, but those features work against the mystery that draws people into a story. And, of course, as with all collaborative projects, I
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worried—what if we build it and nobody comes? A Worlds Fair with only a smattering of exhibits would be a sad affair. I began designing some pages. The space theme was in the back of my mind as I went about my normal activities of reading email and browsing on the Web. One of the online newsletters I do read carefully is Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater, and at the bottom of one message was an incidental URL for an image from NASA called “Birth of a Star.” This has by now became a famous image, but at the time it was quite new. I clicked on the link to check it out and was overwhelmed by the stunning color, dynamics, and beauty of the image. I wanted to use it as the opening image for Worlds Fair, so I downloaded the image at the various resolutions and sizes available at the Web site. But the file size of the image was huge; the file size would need to be reduced to use it on a Web site that would be accessed by modem. I first tried the quick and simple approach of opening it in Lemke Software’s GRAPHICCONVERTER, scaling the size down, and minimizing the colors. But, there were so many colors and so much detail that the file size was not reduced appreciably. So I moved into the more sophisticated Adobe PHOTOSHOP for further reductions, but still the image file was huge, and I couldn’t risk having it tile (repeat over and over again instead of appearing as one solid image) on a large monitor. In every case, to get the file down to a reasonable size resulted in unacceptable levels of quality or size (I’ve since incorporated it into a porthole view out of a space shuttle). Still, wrestling with the image spurred my thoughts about using a starfield for the background of the opening page. I thought I’d have to find a smaller image and allow it to tile for the background. That way, too, it would better adapt to different size monitors. I searched the NASA site and also the image archives at Webseek and finally found an example with enough complexity to be interesting when tiled as a background, yet with a reasonably small file size. Superimposed on this background would be the title, but I was not yet clear how to represent the title or how much information I should provide for readers. I wanted to develop an opening sequence to draw readers into the story, engage them in debate about the mission, then invite their participation. This opening sequence would lead directly to the Worlds Fair exhibits. The opening sequence features a simple title page, which offers very little information: “Worlds Fair, a collaborative composition.” At this point I shifted from thinking primarily in text mode to “thinking in Web.” To give the opening screen a bit more interest, I decided to animate the title, not through motion, but through color change. The color change echoes an effect used later in the story in the invitation to Worlds Fair. So in the beginning, the title cycles through a spectrum of colors. (See Figure 1 for a plain-text version of the opening image.) There is no indication of what to do next, but I reasoned that by now readers had enough experience with the Web to think “point and click—something will happen.” When they do, readers are drawn into a linear sequence of pages with no navigation cues and no sense of what comes next. Originally, the second page was completely black; the only effect was the sound of a ringing phone to create the mood of an urgent phone call in the middle of the night. My colleague John Slatin pointed out that although this page works for visually impaired readers, it would be lost on hearing-impaired readers. To address this need, while still building suspense, I added an animation of a telephone with a cone of light, as if on a bedside table. The next page shows only what appears to be a time readout from a digital clock—3:15 a.m. The reader is then summoned to the White House for an urgent meeting.
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Fig. 1. Worlds Fair opening image.
This minimally interactive narrative sequence sets the context for the project to come and leads directly to the Worlds Fair invitation (see Figure 2) from beyond the galaxy, which has mysteriously appeared in the White House. Because the invitation itself represents a critical
Fig. 2. Invitation to the intergalactic Worlds Fair.
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shift in the project’s development, it’s worth looking closely at the process of bringing together existing experience, technological constraints, problem-solving, and imagination to create it. 4.1. The invitation The intergalactic invitation to the Worlds Fair posed interesting challenges. In terms of the story development, the visual representation had to frame the invitation in an intriguing and compelling way, yet it had to retain a bit of mystery: Was it all a hoax, a stunt of some kind? It also needed to have features that explicitly marked it as extraterrestrial. I realized that the affordances of the Web could provide a representation that simply could not be achieved in conventional print media: the message gradually appears as you are reading it, and at the same time it also changes color. Yet, the invitation appears in the story as a print document. How could this be accomplished? I finally decided to rough out the idea as an animation, using a shareware application called GIFBUILDER. I tinkered with fonts and colors and timing until it looked reasonable, then tested it online over a modem connection as well as a high-speed connection, using Microsoft INTERNET EXPLORER and Netscape COMMUNICATOR and both Macintosh and PC/IBM platforms. When I was satisfied with it, I submitted it to the most rigorous test I could imagine: my tech-savvy teenager, a film and computer artist. He pronounced the effects “cheesy,” and suggested that the project ought to be developed in a high-end animation package. Naturally, this critical response provoked a crisis. On the one hand, I wanted the project to showcase the powerful potential of the Web with cutting-edge effects. My conflicting desire was to show students that it is possible to create compelling compositions with readily accessible, no-cost, or low-cost software. There is a constant ramping up of the technological ante that gives students the impression that you need to have the latest, fastest machines, the newest high-end software, the fastest net connection, the latest browser plug-ins if you want to design compelling multimedia projects. For many students this is not a realistic goal. The financial costs, the steep learning curve, and the rapid pace of cutting-edge developments are prohibitive. At this critical moment, I made a decision that had implications for the entire project: Worlds Fair would model the possibilities inherent in easily accessible, cheap, or free applications and resources. From that point on I depended on online archives of freely available backgrounds, sounds, and graphics; on inexpensive shareware or freeware programs such as Lemke Software’s GRAPHICCONVERTER, GIFBUILDER, Claris HOME PAGE, and FETCH; on low-bandwidth Internet connections; and on freely available javascripts. I decided to model as many different features of Web design as I could: frames, tables, animations, sounds, and message forums. In the actual drafting phase, however, I just reached for whatever tools or features would provide the effect I wanted. 4.2. Interactivity With the main story launched, I faced the problem of engaging students as participants and contributors. They would be developing projects for the Worlds Fair exhibition, but first they
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needed some connection to the story. I wanted to get them involved early, so that they could be thinking about their projects as integral to the story. And, how would the actual assignment be made? It seems obvious now, but it represented a real puzzle. I decided to involve them early in the original debate about the invitation, first presented as a page of dialogue among the President’s advisors. I could have engaged students in a class discussion, but I wanted to be sure that every student had a chance to respond, so I set up a message forum designed to advise the President: Should the Worlds Fair mission be undertaken? Students took on a role (sixth-grade teacher, chief of military operations, physician, artist, and so on) as a basis for their response. This was not an extended writing assignment, but the first step of their participation in the project. In the next step, they were informed via email message that the President had issued a call for proposals to create exhibits for the mission. These proposals were, in fact, going to be the students’ project proposals. To lend authenticity to the call for proposals, I adapted an actual call issued by the Computer Aided Education and Training Initiative sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) several years ago, complete with its impenetrable governmental jargon. I reworked the specifications to match the project requirements, clarified the language, and set deadlines for proposals, drafts, and final exhibits. I also included a link to a set of criteria for reviewing projects that could be used by writers, peer readers, and the program director (me), who had the final authority to approve projects, recommend revisions, and suggest collaborators. I wanted to give Worlds Fair’s diverse array of documents the appearance of coming from different sources, yet I also wanted to address students directly. Javascripts can be used to insert the actual date into documents addressed to the reader to lend immediacy and currency to the project. It is more difficult, however, to provide a sense of age and physicality for electronic documents. The email message that assigned the project to students appeared on a wood-grain background suggesting a desk, with a humorous twist. Javascript ants run over the page where a half-eaten chocolate-chip cookie serves as a paperweight. The ants will follow the cursor, but if you click on one, it disappears, only to be replaced by another coming in from the edge (see Figure 3 for a text-only view of the page). The call for proposals page sported a graphic of a sticky note stuck on before passing the call along to the reader. On the proposal information packet I added a graphic of a coffee cup stain to give the impression that it had been knocked around the office for some time. These effects were readily available from clip art and public javascript archives. Once again I wanted to increase students’ engagement with the project, and also encourage them to collaborate and to learn from each other. I established a second forum for posting proposals, with the requirement that students post their own proposals and respond to two others. As the ARCA1 “Program Manager,” I issued the final approval for each project on the forum, with suggestions about focusing the topic, teaming up with other similar proposals, and so on. In rare cases, I rejected a proposal as inappropriate for the mission, suggesting a resubmission. The message forum was ideal for this purpose. It allowed students to read and respond to each other’s proposals; they benefited from seeing other proposals and they also discovered ways to help each other or collaborate on their projects.
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Fig. 3. The hazards of cookies.
4.3. The exhibits I didn’t want this project to be limited to one class. In fact, I wanted to encourage people outside the University of Texas at Austin and even outside the academy to participate as well, either in groups or as individuals. But I could see that as the project scaled up, it would present a new dilemma: How could all these projects be represented without overwhelming visitors? One possibility was to group projects by topic: There might be an art area, for example, a history area, an education area, a medical area. This idea had a lot of appeal, because over time students could develop coherent environments by building on each other’s work. These topical neighborhoods would allow visitors to browse among areas of interest. On the other hand, it would necessarily create distinctions that would be difficult to draw: Should a virtual reality environment appear in the art area or in the technology area? Even with the possibility of hyperlinking, the results could be unsatisfying. Ultimately, for better or worse, I decided to create exhibit halls for each class (see Figure 4), each hall complete with a message forum set up as a cafe´, where people could comment on the exhibit hall as a whole or on particular exhibits. In this way, the class identity was preserved, and students could locate their classmates’ work easily. I divided the exhibit halls into two main sections: exhibits from Earth and exhibits from other galaxies. I hoped this would also encourage contributions from those instructors or
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Fig. 4. Exhibit hall for an Information Architecture class.
interested individuals teaching or creating science fiction or fantasy. I wrote some pages to provide background information about the project and suggest how others could be involved. For students, outside contributors, and other audiences, it seemed it would be helpful to have a navigation aid. I used several clever table tricks first mentioned in Darrell Sano’s (1996) Designing Large-Scale Web Sites to create the image of a book with a table of contents and a list of front matter, including pages for credits and lists of participants (see Figure 5). By fall semester 1999, over 80 students had contributed to Worlds Fair. 4.4. Classified documents The real idea underlying the Worlds Fair Project is that we will not get better futures unless we are actively engaged in imagining the possibilities. To imagine new possibilities, we need to break out of assumptions and habits of mind that limit our thinking. Science fiction has long been an important realm of imagination that can be freed of the constraints of our common-sense understandings about the physical and social world. I wondered how to convey to students the liberatory quality of mind that can lead to genuinely new solutions, expansions, and developments that have real potential for building a better future. Mean-
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Fig. 5. “Table of Contents” for Worlds Fair.
while, I could not figure out how to give students a sense of the experience of the Worlds Fair itself, of the exhibits from other galaxies and their representations of extraterrestrial knowledge, of the contact with beings with advanced wisdom and understanding. Actually, in my original story idea the motive behind the Worlds Fair invitation was not, as it turns out, entirely benign: There was great concern in other galaxies about the precarious situation on Earth and human potential to destroy a viable and valuable life-supporting ecosystem. The invitation was intended to bootstrap humans’ development and commit them to changes that would ensure and protect Earth’s future. But, it was not clear to me how to represent the advanced knowledge of these beings and their concern, or how to integrate it into the Web project. About two years after the initial development of Worlds Fair, the idea of a set of “classified documents” occurred to me. These documents would represent fragments of notes and journals kept by the American crew visiting Worlds Fair, and thus would have to have been sent back from the future. How were they found? I decided they must have appeared as bona fides with the initial invitation. The classified documents ultimately turned into a major section of the project. To create the mood of a classified area, I used a javascript that asks the reader for identification, then inserts the reader’s name into a “cover letter” sporting a NASA logo on the letterhead and today’s date, granting the reader permission to access the documents designated “for your eyes only.” What would these documents consist of, and who would have authored them? I wanted a diverse set of observations and reactions to encounters with both extraterrestrial beings and their exhibits. Some candidates began to materialize: the President’s son, the military chief of operations, a doctor, a biologist, and a physicist. For this part of the project, it was important to give a timeless feeling to these fragmented, paradoxically aged documents coming from the future. Consequently, even the dates are nebulous. A spiral notebook image was used for one background, and I created a graph paper background for the physicist and a recycled-looking tan paper for the military captain. In several cases, I used handwriting fonts to create the text of the document in GRAPHICCONVERTER, saving them as graphics with transparent backgrounds to reduce the file size. In other cases I used conventional fonts in various colors, with graphics for signatures. It was a challenge to create documents that featured different rhetorical styles and voices to represent
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Fig. 6. Journal fragment from Jeremy, the President’s son.
different composers of these pieces, but it was an equal challenge to create different visual representations of each fragment to match the character who presumably wrote it. The journal of the President’s son, for example, complains about having his younger brother Max along. But he speaks glowingly about the exhibits he’s seen. As a teasing gesture, I added four boxes representing photos or drawings he had attached to his journal. Across each box is a large graphic censoring the exhibit in a red stencil font that reads “PERMISSION DENIED” (see Figure 6). Each of these fragments represents a glimpse of an idea about another version of reality. The virtue of such fragmentary evidence (a page of a journal here, a memo there) is that the actual representations of the exhibits do not need to be fully documented. The suggestive hints are intended to intrigue and provoke the imagination, not present a full-blown vision.
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In this way, too, the document collection can continue to be expanded. Furthermore, participants could suggest their own contributions to the classified documents. The most recent addition I’ve made is a transcript of a conversation between a professor of modern languages and a being whose home language lacks nouns and is instead based primarily on verbs.
5. Conclusion This project has taught me a great deal about the integration of imagination, rhetoric, esthetics, hardware, software, networks, pedagogy, and design architecture. The ongoing, open-ended development process is unlike anything I’ve attempted in conventional publication. There are few limits to the range of the project. For example, in the past year I’ve added new javascripts for the moving stars on the opening screen, sound effects, and theme music for the title sequence. When Swatch, a Swiss watch manufacturer, introduced the concept of Internet time, which divides the day into 1,000 numbered units that determine the time all over the world without regard to time zones, I added an “@time” clock to the classified documents. When articles on quantum computing began appearing in science news, it was a simple matter to incorporate a reference to the concepts into the mathematician’s memo to the President. Students’ responses to the project have been positive; they become seriously engaged in the discussions and the exhibits. Still, real challenges remain: For example, I have not had enough time to encourage outside participation, which would contribute to the scope and depth of the project. As the project scales up, coherence and navigability will be increasingly important for readers. I have not yet been able to give serious attention to accessibility issues. Still, I am pleased with the steady emergence of the core concepts of Worlds Fair, and it continues to spark my imagination. How will it develop next? I’m thinking seriously about layers, interactive behaviors, databases, and other features that can enrich and expand the experience of participants and visitors. Bruno Latour (1986) called this process “thinking with the eyes and hands,” suggesting that our technological applications are no longer simply tools that we use to implement our ideas, but become the very media of thought itself. The major challenge for those instructors who want to incorporate visual rhetoric into our composition courses is how to convey this model of thinking with the media, rather than depending on a model of thinking first and then representing our ideas in the media. This necessary transformation in our thinking is nowhere more apparent than in Edwin Hutchins’ (1995) Cognition in the Wild. His description of the coordination of tasks, cognitive artifacts, perception, knowledge, and action in navigation is a model of a cognitive ecology in which it is clear that the cognitive processes are distributed throughout the system. The activity of navigation is a process of thinking through the tools, charts, records, and social structures, not a simple question of applying them. We might also be well-served by concepts drawn from architecture, which has a long tradition of coordinating materials, concepts, esthetics, technical knowledge, and social interaction. Christopher Alexander for example, described architecture not in terms of elements such as doors and walls, but as a set of “pattern languages” based on relationships
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that support “recurring patterns of activity” (Alexander, 1964, 1979; Alexander, Ishikawa, & Silverstein, 1977). This is an apt description that applies equally to online compositions and to pedagogical environments as well. We are guided in our teaching by pattern languages (for example, workshops on drafts, message forums, or class email lists) that support recurring patterns of activity (such as interaction and conversation between students, ongoing improvements in a piece of writing, and so on). These pattern languages are both cultural and personal; they give shape to learning environments even in new and unfamiliar media. We can learn a great deal about thinking through these media if we are willing to pay attention to our own composing processes. Visual rhetoric, too, has its pattern languages that we can discover not only through formal training, but also through our own inquiry and experimentation. In this way we can continue to expand our capacity to develop teaching and learning environments that push well beyond our original training and expertise.
Notes 1. This was a made-up acronym spelled out in the mock request for proposals as “Advanced Research and Communication Agency.” It’s a play on ARPA (now DARPA).
Margaret Syverson is the director of the Computer Writing and Research Lab and an associate professor in the Division of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas–Austin. Her book, The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition, was recently published by Southern Illinois Press. She is president of the Board of Directors for the Center for Language in Learning, and editor of Computers and Composition Online (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃ccjrnl). Her work with the Online Learning Record, a portfolio-based assessment system (www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃syverson/olr), has been supported through a CAETI grant and a Carnegie Scholars Award. Additional information about Syverson may be found at 具http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃syverson典.
References Alexander, Christopher. (1964). Notes on the synthesis of form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alexander, Christopher. (1979). The timeless way of building. New York: Oxford University Press. Alexander, Christopher, Ishikawa, Sara, & Silverstein, Murray. (1977). A pattern language. New York: Oxford University Press. Hutchins, Edwin. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. (1986). Visualization and cognition: thinking with the eyes and hands. In Knowledge and society: studies in the sociology of culture past and present, 6, 1– 40. Sano, Darrell. (1996). Designing large-scale Web sites: a visual design methodology. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
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URLs for resources mentioned Hall, Mike. Ants javascripts. Available: ⬍http://javascript.internet.com⬎. Another excellent javascript archive is ⬍http://www.javascripts.com⬎. Information about Phil Agre’s newsletter, Red Rock Eater, can be found at ⬍http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu.edu/people/ pagre/rre.html⬎. Opening theme music for Worlds Fair is “Dragon Dance,” from the album Sophistication, by Galbatron. See ⬍http://www.mp3.com/Galbatron⬎. Other resources used for the Worlds Fair project are listed at ⬍http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃syverson/ worldsfair/credits.html⬎. Worlds Fair contributors are listed at ⬍http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/⬃syverson/worldsfair/participants.html⬎.