Decentering Textual Authority with <style type="text/css"> body { margin-top:0 !important; padding-top:0 !important; /*min-width:800px !important;*/ } </style> </head> <body> <h1>Critical Thinking with the Interactive Text: <br> Decentering Textual Authority with Mosaic</h1><p> <p> <b><a href="#bio">James Francis Petruzzelli</a></b><br> Technical Writer / Graduate Student of English<br> National Center for Atmospheric Research / University of Colorado<br> (303) 497-1831<br> jimp@ncar.ucar.edu<br> <h3> Abstract</h3> You do not just "read" an interactive text; you produce it. An interactive text empowers the reader to make choices about the text she is reading. It is only possible to read this type of text on a computer running a hypertext-based program, such as Mosaic, because there is no single page or chapter determined in advanced: what happens as you read depends on what the authors have written, but the reader's response as well. Since the functions of reading and writing become almost interchangeable with the interactive text, it becomes difficult to say precisely who is the author of the text. The interactive text doesn't provide a "final signified," not only because it has no single author, but because its textual network allows the reader to produce multiple texts. Theoretical questions of authorship and the relationship of author and reader are not only applicable to interactive texts, but to conventional, print-based texts as well. Although computers and hypertext-based software, like Mosaic, make an interactive text possible, I would argue that literary theorists, like Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, just to name a few, have been talking about this type of text long before Mosaic was something other than a picture made by setting small colored pieces of glass or tile in cement. Even though Mosaic can make the interactive text a possibility, we need to ask whether this is valuable. There are reasons for reading Shakespeare or Chaucer, but they have little to do with technology such as Mosaic. However, as Barton Thurber, Director of the Collegium for Research in Interactive Technologies, has argued: "If technology can potentially affect and determine what we read and write, then the concerns of any discipline, humanities-based or not, are drastically and irrevocably changed" (<a href="#notes">Thurber, p. 61</a>). Furthermore, with the interactive text, critical thinking is no longer something we hope happens in a humanities-based discipline, critical thinking becomes a result of reading/writing and producing an interactive text. <h4> Introduction</h4> My first experience of an interactive text was with a "text" entitled <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> that was produced by the Collegium for Research in Interactive Technologies at the University of San Diego. <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> is an interactive, hypertext-based introduction to the events surrounding the Holocaust in Poland. This interactive text was produced using the NewBook Editor, a Macintosh-based program developed by Chariot Software. I have recently converted the textual nodes of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format. Before you begin to read this paper, I would like to ask you to start by reading the material in <a href="#Appendix">Appendix I</a>. What you will find in this appendix is a text that I produced by reading of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Appendix I</a>, please return here and continue reading from this point. <h3> Conventional Books are Linear and Fixed</h3> The narrative you have just read of David Breslaw reads like a "typical" story. The events in this story that occur are in a fixed, linear presentation. That is, there is a beginning, middle and end. The narrative in <a href="#Appendix">Appendix I</a>, even though I have established a hypertext link to it (for my Mosaic readers), possesses certain characteristics that it has in common with all conventional books. One such characteristic of conventional books, like the one in <a href="#Appendix">Appendix I</a>, is that they are linear and chronological. Readers read forwards, not backwards. Another characteristic that the narrative in <a href="#Appendix">Appendix I</a> has in common with all conventional books is its static or fixed nature. The authors of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> claim the following about conventional books: "Once printed a book is what it is. We may like it or not like it. We can respond, write notes in the margin or another book, agree or disagree. But our having read something does not allow us to change, or even affect what we read; reading and writing are separate activities. The reader can only choose to read, not write, the book in question; it may evoke all kinds of responses, but those responses are the reader's, not the writer's." <a href="#notes">(Center for Research in Interactive Technologies, pp. 2-3)</a>. Whether we accept "linearity" and "fixedness" as characteristics of a conventional book, I would argue that the narrative in <a href="#Appendix">Appendix I</a> is not out of the ordinary.<p> I included <a href="#Appendix">Appendix I</a> in this paper because I wanted to facilitate my discussion of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>. Since you cannot find this text on a book stand or library shelf, I had to provide you with a copy of it. However, even if you were to open the Universal Resource Locator (URL) for the first page of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> on your own Mosaic screen, you would not necessarily find or read the material in <a href="/www2/#Appendix">Appendix I</a>. This is because <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> is an interactive book. That is, the text in <a href="#Appendix">Appendix I</a> was generated by a series of responses that I made to <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> while reading it. Although the particular text you found in <a href="/www2/#Appendix">Appendix I</a> is fixed and linear, <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> is not.<p> This brings up one of my first major points: what is a literary critic supposed to do with an interactive text, like <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>? Most critics can assume that the text in question is not only physically accessible to other readers but is also "fixed." When attempting to discuss <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>, I can't make these assumptions. Even if I had a classroom of students and each had a computer connected to the Internet on her desk and was reading a Mosaic-version of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>, our classroom discussion would not be about the same text. So the best way for me to proceed, then, is to describe what happens when you read <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>. <h3> Reading an Interactive Text Is a Form of Writing </h3> After you begin reading <a href="/www2/notexists.html"If you wish to continue reading, you must choose to become, for the time being, either David or Stefan. Our `book' cannot continue without your participation." <a href="#notes">(Warsaw 1939)</a>. Although a conventional book requires participation from its reader, that is, you must choose to read or not to read, in <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> the text doesn't even exist until you decide to begin reading. Unlike a conventional book, with <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> you can't browse through it, you can't peek at the last page to see if there is going to be a happy ending. In fact, when reading a conventional book, you estimate about how long it will take to read by simply counting the number of pages in the book. Until you decide to read <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>, it doesn't have any pages. Granted, the text of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> is embedded in a number of URLs; this embedded text, however, is only potential and becomes realized only when you decide to start reading. Even when you begin to read, you can never be certain where you "are" in the text.<p> <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> allows the reader to tell herself a story, within the story "field" established by the creators of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>. In his lecture, "Computers, Language, Narrative," Barton Thurber argued that "It is only possible to tell this kind of story on a computer, because there is no single page or chapter determined in advanced: what happens as you read depends on what the authors have written, but for the first time, on the reader's response as well" <a href="/www2/#notes">(Thurber, lecture)</a>. <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> is a narrative field, rather than just a narrative, through which the reader wanders at will. This narrative field of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> is a textual network, and reading involves the choosing of pathways through it. The nodes or URLs are those places where the branches of this textual network intersect, and they are represented by the decisions that <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> asks you to make about the text that you are reading. It is these nodes that allow the reader to perform some of the work ordinarily accomplished by an author. Michael Joyce describes the function of reading an interactive text as "reading and writing electronically in an order you chose; whether among choices represented for you by the writer, or by your discovery of the topographic (sensual) organization of the text. Your choices, not the author's representations or the initial topography, constitute the current state of the text. You become the reader-as-writer" <a href="#notes">(Joyce, [14])</a>. <p> Because the functions of reading and writing become almost interchangeable, it becomes difficult to say precisely who is the author of the text in <a href="#Appendix">Appendix I</a>. As Thurber says regarding the interactive text: "Who shall we call the author? What is the relation between author and reader? If the author no longer can be relied on to be the sole person who sheds meaning onto the text, where does meaning come from?" <a href="#notes">(Thurber, lecture)</a>. These theoretical questions about authorship are not only applicable to interactive texts, such as <a href="/www2/notexists.html">, but also to conventional texts as well. Although computers and software, like Mosaic, make an interactive text possible, I would suggest that literary theorists, like Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, just to name a few, have been talking about this type of text long before Mosaic was something other than a picture made by setting small colored pieces of glass or tile in cement. <h3> Decentering Textual Authority</h3> In his book <u>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Theory and Technology</u>, published in 1992, George Landow argues: " [h]ypertext has much in common with some major points of contemporary literary and semiological theory, particularly with derrida's emphasis on de-centering and with barthes' conception of the readerly versus the writerly text. in fact, hypertext creates an almost embarrassingly literal embodiment of both concepts" <a href="#notes">(Landow, pp. 33-34)</a>. This convergence of contemporary theory and technology has been recognized by other writers of interactive technology. Barton Thurber, in a lecture that he gave at the University of San Diego in the Spring of 1987, claimed that the western world has been in the process of inventing a narrative, like <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>, for the past several decades: <blockquote>Modern approaches to the philosophy of language, or of narrative, however they may differ in other respects, have in common an attitude towards authority--the question of either an author in relation to his text, or of the processes by which a text "authorizes" its own concerns. In both cases the result has tended towards a denial that there are any privileged places to stand; the authority that generates discourse is systematic, existing nowhere outside the language than enables and defines it. <a href="#notes">(Thurber, lecture)</a></blockquote>The issue of authority is a primary concern to Roland Barthes in his essays "From Work to Text" and "The Death of the Author." In fact, I would suggest that Barthes' idea of "Text" better describes an interactive text than the modern texts he discusses.<p> In his essay "From Work to Text" Barthes makes the following distinctions between "Works" and "Texts:" <blockquote>The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field ... [T]he work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse (or rather, it is a Text for the very reason it knows itself as text); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production. <a href="#notes">(Barthes, pp. 156-57)</a> </blockquote>This distinction between "Work" and "Text" works well for my discussion of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>. What Barthes defines as "Work" coincides with what I previously described as a conventional book. From Barthes' perspective, <a href="/www2/notexists.html" because "it is experienced only in an activity of production." I interpret this to mean that reading a "Text," like <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>, entails producing what you read. <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>, to use Barthes' terminology, is a "methodological field," a "process of demonstration," and cannot stop "on a library shelf." "The metaphor of the Text," says Barthes "is that of the network" <a href="#notes">(Barthes, p. 161)</a>. Thus, the concept of network that Barthes uses metaphorically to describe his "Text" becomes the internal structure and technology of the World Wide Web and Mosaic. Barthes can only speak of his "Text" in terms of metaphor. Whereas the reader of Barthes' "Text" metaphorically produces the text that she reads, the reader of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>, according to Barthes' definition, is a "Text"; this textuality, however, is not metaphorical but actual. The textual "network" in the HTML version of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> is not a metaphor but the actual, engineering design embedded in the World Wide Web and Mosaic.<p> In another essay by Barthes, "The Death of the Author," he argues that literary critics attempt to explain the "Work" by understanding or discovering the author: "The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions ... The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author `confiding' in us" <a href="#notes">(Barthes, p. 143)</a>. Although I do not wish to argue that authorship is dead in <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>, I do want to stress that there is no one person responsible for the "Work" located in <a href="#Appendix">Appendix I</a>. Thus, the "explanation" of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> would have to be sought in the reader, the designers of <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>, the programmers who originally created NewBook (the Macintosh-based system that made <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> possible), as well as the creators of the World Wide Web, Mosaic, and HTML. There is no one author to be discovered beneath <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>: <blockquote>Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author ... beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is "explained"--victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic. <a href="#notes">(Barthes, p. 147)</a> </blockquote>Thus, for Barthes, the "Text" accounts for the disappearance of the author, as well as the literary critic. Although I do not wish to assert that the critic's sole endeavor is to find the author, I would suggest that <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a> has no place for such a critic. There is no one author to be found, not to mention that there is no one text to be read. <a href="/www2/notexists.html" not only because it has no author, but because its textual network allows the reader to produce multiple texts that produce multiple and varied signifieds and result in multiple readings. Even if we were able to give an author to <u>Warsaw 1939</u>, its very nature resists being closed. A limit can't be imposed on an interactive text that is susceptible to potential change with every reading.<p> Even though Barthes clearly privileges "Texts" over "Works" and would argue that <a href="/www2/notexists.html" does this necessarily mean that the interactive text is valuable? This is precisely the issue that Umberto Eco addresses in his essay "Poetics of the Open Work." Eco begins this essay by discussing modern instrumental music. Eco claims that the musical compositions of composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio are likened by a common feature: "[T]he considerable autonomy to the individual performer in the way he chooses to play the work" <a href="#notes">(Eco, p. 47)</a>. Like Barthes' dead author, Eco suggests that these musical "Texts" remove the Composer. The performer, writes Eco, "is not merely free to interpret the composer's instructions following his own discretion (which in fact happens in traditional music), but he must impose his judgment on the form of the piece, as when he decides how long to hold a note or in what order to group the sounds: all this amounts to an act of improvised creation" <a href="#notes">(Eco, p. 47)</a>. The musical performers of these "open" compositions are participating in the creation of what they are performing. Their performance, I would suggest, is similar to reading <a href="/www2/notexists.html" allows one to create the "Text." Berio and Stockhausen, according to Eco, seem to hand the performers a composition that is "more or less like the components of a construction kit" <a href="#notes">(Eco, p. 49)</a>. Eco questions why these composers seem unconcerned about the manner in which their musical "Texts" will be performed: "[T]he most immediately striking aspect of these musical forms can lead to this kind of uncertainty, which is itself a positive feature: it invites us to consider why the contemporary artist feels the need to work in this kind of direction, to try to work out what historical evolution of aesthetic sensibility led up to it and which factors in modern culture reinforced it" <a href="#notes">(Eco, pp. 49-50)</a>. Thus, Eco views the "uncertainty" of these musical "Texts," and by analogy <a href="/www2/notexists.html">Warsaw 1939</a>, as positive and valuable. This "uncertainty" comes from the fact that these "Texts" deny that there are any privileged points of view. Authority is decentered because these "Texts" are multi-centered. <h3> Critical Thinking and Open-Ended Conclusions</h3> Eco, I would suggest, is arguing that the "open" work complements what we might call a twentieth-century world view that "dissolves what had been understood as a relation to some authority, which is presumed to stand somewhere outside the text or universe" <a href="#notes">(Thurber, lecture)</a>. Thus, the technology of hypertext embodies this view into interactive narratives. I am not suggesting that every human being living in the twentieth century shares this "decentered" view of the world, but the point I want to underline is that any point of view, privileged or not, can be contested and challenged. This raises another point I want to make: even though interactive technology, like Mosaic, makes a "decentered," interactive text a possibility, we need to ask whether this is valuable. There are reasons for reading Shakespeare or Chaucer, but they have little to do with technology such as Mosaic. However, as Thurber has argued: "If technology can potentially affect and determine what we read and write, then the concerns of any discipline, humanities-based or not, are drastically and irrevocably changed" <a href="#notes">(Thurber, p. 61)</a>. Thus, whether or not we find value or use in the interactive text, they are being written, and they are providing alternate forms of reading and writing. <p> Since the interactive text is an "open" work, I do not want to provide closure to this paper. Rather than making an attempt to discover any "final signifieds," I will end with a personal story. As a college instructor of literature, I make every effort to challenge my students to think critically. Two years ago I was teaching a course in American Literature to a group of freshman and sophomore students at the University of Colorado. Early in the semester I noticed that a number of my students would make the assumption that a narrator's voice in a novel was the voice of the author. For example, while discussing <u>Huck Finn</u>, a few students suggested that we could <i>know</i> Mark Twain's perspective on slavery in America by listening to Huck. Their assumptions suggested to me that if I wanted critical thinking to happen in my classroom, I would need to do something drastic. I decided to provide my student's with a "rule" for reading fiction, which goes as follows: "Never assume that you can trust or believe a narrator, and always begin by assuming that the narrator is either lying, naive, stupid or psychotic." After I wrote this rule on the board, a student who was sitting in the back row of the class raised his hand and said: "But, this means we have to be critical with everything we read." I simply responded by smiling. For me, my student's response suggested that it wasn't going to be necessary for a flash of inspiration, or some other force of the sublime, to strike my students in order for critical thinking to occur in our classroom. That is, this simple rule, if abided, would force them to form critical thinking skills. Embedded in the rule is the assumption that there are no privileged points of view, and we find this very assumption inherent in the technology World Wide Web and Mosaic, as well. So, from my perspective as an English instructor, I would suggest that the interactive text is valuable for pedagogical reasons. Since part of what we teach in the humanities is ambiguity and uncertainty, authority needs to be decentered in order for our students to articulate their own perspectives as well as the perspectives of others. With a text that is non-linear, multi-centered and has the potential to change with every reading, ambiguity and uncertainty are unavoidable. As Harry Goldstein has noted: "Not only is there room for a vast range of interpretations, but hyperfiction actively encourages multiplex reactions and interactions" <a href="#notes">(Goldstein, p. 131)</a>. Furthermore, with the interactive text, critical thinking is no longer something we hope happens in a humanities-based discipline, critical thinking becomes a result of reading/writing and producing an interactive text. <a name="Appendix"><h3>Appendix I</h3></a> "... on Saturday noon of November 4, 1939, the SS ordered Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat, to summon all twenty-four members to an emergency meeting at 4:00 p. m. At the appointed time, sixteen or seventeen had arrived and were waiting apprehensively. At 4:15, eight armed Gestapo officers burst in. After a roll call, the commanding officer [Dr. Rudolf Batz] gave those present half an hour to assemble all twenty-four members and all twenty-four alternates. People randomly available in the building and passersby were impressed to join the meeting. When the Gestapo officer returned, this time with some fifty men, he did not check credentials, but simply lined up the Judenrat members in one row and the putative "alternates" in another. He then read a decree supposedly issued by the army Command that ordered all Jews of Warsaw to move within three days into an area that was to be designated as a Jewish ghetto. The twenty-four alternates were then removed as hostages, with the warning that they would be shot if the Judenrat failed to comply with the order as specified." (Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, p. 276) This was an actual event; the first warning the Jews of Warsaw had that they would be prisoners in a walled city of death and misery.<p> From this point forward you will begin to face some of the same choices faced by the Jews. In every case, the choice you face was actually faced by a real person.<p> Imagine two characters involved in the drama described above. One, David, is a young Jewish man who happened to be in the building. He is asked to stand in for one of the missing Judenrat officials. He agrees, and thus instantaneously assumes major responsibility for the fate of Warsaw's Jews. And there is a second man, an older Polish gentleman named Stefan. Quite by accident, he is passing the building when the frantic search for "alternates" takes place. Before he can protest that he is not Jewish, he is lined up against the wall, forced to listen to the decrees of the Gestapo, and then is rushed into the waiting vans as a hostage.<p> If you wish to continue reading NewBook, you must choose to become, for the time being, either David or Stefan. Our "book" cannot continue without your participation. We would like to emphasize that actions have consequences--here, in what you read, as well as in real life.<p> David Breslaw, his wife Tosia, and three pre-adolescent daughters, formed a traditional Jewish household in Warsaw, and took their faith seriously. Traditional Judaism places exceptional responsibility on each Jew to defend the Jewish tradition, despite the cycles of disaster in Jewish history and the antisemitism Jews regularly faced. This tradition has also been affected by the political powerlessness which has usually been the Jewish fate. Therefore, the religious tradition has often favored submissiveness. The Talmud recalls that "The Holy Spirit says, 'I adjure you that if the earthly kingdom decrees persecutions, you shall not rebel in all that it decrees against you, but you shall keep the king's command.'" This teaching has tended to maintain the moral strength of the community and to lessen the impact of humiliation and suffering. Many Jews, like Adam, therefore made virtues of self-discipline and moderation. They were willing to postpone immediate gratification for a later, and presumably greater, benefit. By the same token, however, they were also willing to take decisive action--emigration, ransoming hostages, active defense--if it seemed absolutely necessary. As a practicing Jew, and as an individual now responsible for the welfare of his people, David Breslaw now faces the most important decision of his life. <p> David advises the Judenrat to bargain with the SS authorities to extend the deadline for concentrating Jews in the ghetto. On the second day he meets privately with Dr. Batz, and offers him a $1000 bribe to extend the deadline by one month, a more reasonable timetable for complying with the SS order. Batz demands no less than $10,000, but agrees to extend the deadline on Judenrat terms. Miraculously, the Judenrat succeed in coordinating the forced relocation by early December, l939, and the lives of the twenty-four hostages are spared. In early March, 1940, the SS declares the Jewish ghetto a "Plague-Infected Area," and on March 27 orders the Judenrat to build a wall around it. The Germans tell Jews the walls were being constructed to defend them against "Polish excesses"; they tell Poles that Jews were being sealed off to protect the Polish population from the typhoid epidemic. <p> David realizes the construction of the wall would isolate the Jews, and further empower the SS in restricting the Judenrat's freedom of action. David and the Judenrat therefore met to decide which course of action they should follow.<p> David and the other Judenrat officials decide to ignore the ultimatum issued by the Gestapo, because they are convinced the SS is bluffing. Enraged by the Judenrat's inaction, the Gestapo chief arranged for the public execution of the twenty-four hostages on the fourth day, and randomly selected twelve members of the Judenrat to be shot as well. David was one of the twelve selected, and died instantly of a single shot to the back of his head. <a name="notes"><h3>Works Cited</h3></a> Barthes, Roland. <u>Image Music Text</u>. New York: The Noonday Press, 1990.<p> <p> Center for Research in Interactive Technologies. <u>NewBook User's Guide</u>. San Diego: Chariot Software Group, 1990.<p> <p> Eco, Umberto. <u>The Role of the Reader</u>. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.<p> <p> Goldstein, Harry. "The Changing Shape of Fiction." <u>Utne Reader</u>, (March/April, 1994).<p> <p> Joyce, Michael. "Notes Toward an Unwritten Non-linear Electronic Text: The Ends of Print Culture." <u>Postmodern Culture</u>, V.2, No. 1 (September, 1991)<p> <p> Landow, George. <u>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and</u> <u>Technology</u>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.<p> <p> Thurber, Barton. "The Book, the Computer and the Humanities." <u>T.H.E. Journal</u>, 19, No. 1 (1991).<p> <p> Thurber, Barton. "Computers, Language, Narrative." USD English Department Lecture Series, University of San Diego, March 1987. <a name="bio"><h3>Author Biography</h3></a> I am a technical writer / editor at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) where I work with Mosaic to develop and maintain various online user documentation for NCAR's Scientific Computing Division. In addition to my technical writing endeavors, I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado in the English Literature department. I have taught courses in English and American Literature, as well as survey courses in Drama. My primary period of study is Eighteenth Century British Literature, and my theoretical framework is focused on folkloric approaches to vernacular culture. Recently, I delivered a paper at the April 1994 Conference of the Popular Culture Association entitled, "La Festa di San Trifone: An Italian-American Custom in the Land of the Dodgers." </body></html>