I really do mean to polish off this paper, but I hit a snag in my writing and, while staring into space, my eyes start to wander. To my left, a woman is using her computer to write what appears to be a love note. Two taps on the computer's keys, and her sentiments are launched into the electronic ether that is e-mail. On my right, a man is reading his e-mail. No love letter for him just now. Instead, he peruses the latest position papers from the Clinton White House.
Research, love letters, public affairs -- welcome to the electronic academical
village, where everything from ancient Latin texts to the latest physics
research can be delivered to your computer "doorstep" in a matter of moments
and where your "next-door neighbor" can be anywhere on earth. This is the
story of how I moved, a little reluctantly, into this new neighborhood and
what I've found here.
Of all Mr. Jefferson's hopes for his University, perhaps the most heartfelt was that it would be an "academical village," a place where students and faculty could live and study in a spirit of collegiality. The Rotunda -- the library -- was clearly the town center. Over the years, of course, the University grew in ways Jefferson could not have imagined. Today its 16 libraries hold more than 3 million volumes and receive 19,000 journals and 180 newspapers from around the world. The sheer magnitude of information, coupled with ever-increasing compartmentalization of knowledge, threatened to make the idea of an academical village obsolete.
In some respects, the electronic revolution in information storage and
processing provides an answer to the problem of "info-sprawl." The advent of
electronic letters,
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bulletin boards, journals and books, along with the power of computers to link
users at the flip of a switch, means once-formidable obstacles to close
communication, such as space and time, simply vanish. With computers, the
residents of Mr. Jefferson's University are linked more closely than at any
time since 1826. More important, perhaps, they are also linked to people and
information almost anywhere else on earth.
As I use a computer in my job (as a writer for the University's News Office), my academic research, my correspondence, even in planning my vacation, it seems more and more as if I'm standing at the entrance to Aladdin's cave. It is a prospect both thrilling and frightening. On the one hand I'm dazzled by the feats of communication and research I can now perform with ease. On the other hand, I feel a vague sense of uneasiness: perhaps this is only the trepidation common to users of any new technology, but perhaps it is something deeper. Even as a newcomer, I can see that life in the electronic academical village will reshape what it means to write, to read, to collaborate, to learn -- maybe even what it means to think.
For most students, the computer is a tool for word processing; today's first-years probably think white-out is something that happens during a blizzard. But students who use computers only as word processors have just begun to scratch the surface of what's possible.
Making the possible real is one way to describe the job of Polley McClure, U.Va.'s vice president for information technology and communication, or ITC. Ms. McClure's team oversees the expansion of U.Va.'s electronic infrastructure, including electronic mail routes. After word processing, e-mail is often the first computer technology that new kids on the electronic block pick up. Oddly enough, it revives an old technology, the handwritten letter, to overcome a problem in a newer technology, the dreaded "phone-tag." Imagine, no more of those pink "while you were out" slips piling up on our desks. With e-mail, one simply types a message of any length onto the computer, adds an e-mail address, and sends it off to its destination with the stroke of a single key.
Eventually, everyone at the University will be able to
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send and receive e-mail from a personal computer -- and not just to
correspondents on the Grounds. U.Va., like most other large institutions, is
linked to a vast web of computer networks called Internet. An Internet user at
U.Va. can send an e-mail message almost anywhere in the world. So, for
example, the love letter I peeked at the other day could have been on its way
to Vienna, Virginia, or Vienna, Austria. And here's the really fun part: it's
free!
U.Va., like every other institution linked by Internet, maintains just its own part of the network. Users elsewhere have access to the University's electronic facilities, including e-mail, without charge. In return, users based at U.Va. enjoy the same privileges on other networks, which may number around 6,000 worldwide. As many as 6 million individuals in more than 100 countries may tap into Internet, although the network is so big -- and so decentralized -- that no one knows how big it really is. What is known is that the sheer pleasure of corresponding electronically with, say, scientific colleagues in Europe or high-school friends in California is what first draws many into the electronic village.
Ms. McClure confirms that most undergraduates who are not science or engineering students begin their computer use by producing term papers and other documents, then move on to swapping e-mail with friends. Those who are curious enough may begin to explore the many data bases available on-line or use computers in other ways to assist with research. However, Ms. McClure notes, "this learning takes place haphazardly. We at ITC hope to make computer training for students a more systematic and deliberate process."
Ms. McClure sees e-mail as a way to improve communication between students and faculty -- in a sense, an electronic extension of office hours. Except with e-mail, students may put questions to a professor as soon as those questions come to mind. But doesn't e-mail eliminate the spontaneity and the instantaneous feedback that is the essence of face-to-face communication? Yes, Ms. McClure agreed, e-mail should not replace conversation but should supplement it. However, she added, phrasing questions clearly and concisely for e-mail missives may actually be a good exercise for improving communication skills generally.
Still, for all its convenience, e-mail has its drawbacks. For one thing, as my recent experience in Cocke Hall showed, letter writers may not be working in private. Perhaps I'm just too sentimental, but a love letter read off a computer screen is not my idea of intimate communication. Even when the correspondents are strangers, without visual and vocal clues about the speaker's emotions, misunderstandings can easily arise.
This problem is especially evident on electronic bulletin boards. Bulletin Board Services, or BBSs, permit members (membership is often free or just a few dollars a year) to post and read messages. Depending on the BBS, postings may be limited to a very specific topic -- such as bird watching, existential philosophy, or antique autos -- or may be just for general chitchat. BBSers are strangers to one another; to avoid misunderstandings about posted messages, they have come up with some ingenious ways to indicate that something is being written in jest and should not be taken as an insult. Using a colon, a hyphen and a single parenthesis, e-mailers draw a smiley face like this, :-). Turn the page sideways and you'll see the eyes, nose and smile. Here's a person winking ;-). It means "I'm just joking." Really clever writers may add glasses, %, a toupee, {, or a surprised mouth, o, to their smiley face and get {%-o. To me it's a pleasing irony that so advanced a technology must rely on iconographs, one of the most ancient forms of written communication, to maintain good humor among users.
A bulletin board I've been working with lately is called "ProfNet," which puts journalists in touch with experts in academe. Linking 715 public information officers representing 340 universities, colleges and research centers, it has already changed the way I do my job. Most mornings I turn on my computer to find at least a dozen ProfNet requests: a reporter at the Boston Globe is looking for an expert on the pagan origins of Christmas; writers for a public television series want to interview biologists, mathematicians or engineers; a magazine writer in Germany needs someone who can talk about ethical issues raised by human cloning. If someone at U.Va. fits the bill, details can be relayed instantly to the journalist and, with luck, a bit of University expertise will receive public exposure far from Charlottesville.
In addition to making electronic mail possible, the ITC team is overseeing the
gradual connection of personal computers to the
Grounds-Wide Information
Server, or GWIS. Aptly pronounced Gee-Whiz, this is a multigated
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passageway into numerous worlds of information. Close to home, GWIS members
may check out the University's academic, social or athletic calendars: details
about course registration and requirements; or the latest news releases and
other publications from the University and its various schools.
Or one might choose the GWIS gateway into the University library's on-line card catalogues to see if a newly published book is available. The library's several data bases of periodical literature can also be entered and searched from any PC linked to GWIS. For those planning to leave their work stations to step outside, a quick check of the weather might be in order -- courtesy of GWIS.
As useful as all this sounds. the real gee-whiz begins when one selects the
menu item "library services." What's available there? How about the
Academic
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American Encyclopedia, updated twice a year? Or all 22 volumes of the
Oxford English
Dictionary? (Incidentally, an electronic search of the
OED will reveal, in a matter of seconds, that
The Cavalier Daily is
cited 15 times for the appearance of such words as "raunchy" and "staffer."
This distinction is due to the devoted efforts of U.Va. English professor
Atcheson Hench who, over a period of 40 years, scoured The Cavalier
Daily and The Daily Progress for new or unusual usages and recorded
them on slips of paper, which he filed in shoeboxes. This word hoard was drawn
upon by the Oxford University Press when it compiled a supplement to the
dictionary in 1957.
Other items available from the "library services" menu include 1990 U.S. Census information, bulletins from the UPI news wire (updated every hour), White House press releases, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the text of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and a growing host of electronic periodicals.
The range of topics covered in electronic journals is staggering. CICNet, a network open to GWIS users, provides access to 570 journals divided into 23 subject areas. Journals in the "politics" category range from Buzz Kill (no kidding) to Education Policy Analysis Archives. When you finish scanning the latest issue of the Coptic Orthodox Church newsletter, you might dip into sports journals to check out news from U.S. football teams or to read up on soccer in Iran or Japan. There are also newsletters for botanists, beekeepers and fruit fly researchers; reports from the National Science Foundation and NASA; abstracts from the Chronicle of Higher Education; and data on human morbidity and mortality from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Just as no one reads all the magazines at a newsstand, the electronic browser
must exercise self-restraint, which is easier said than done, at least in my
case. In the electronic community, enticing distractions abound -- and every one
is just a few keystrokes away. What starts out as a justifiable skimming of
journals relevant to my field often turns into time wasting, pure and simple.
But am I wasting time or engaging in wide-ranging, nontargeted basic research?
Is electronic serendipity beginning to replace the old browse-and-stumble
method of finding unexpectedly useful material in library stacks?
These kinds of questions become even more pressing as I begin to explore a particularly wonderful offering of GWIS, the University's Electronic Text Center. The E-Text Center is both a real place (on the third floor of Alderman Library) filled with sophisticated computers and a helpful staff as well as a cornucopia of "on-line" texts. I've dreamed of owning a library of great books, so the mere listing of just some of the e-texts available through the center makes me giddy. To begin with, there is the English Poetry Full-Text Database (all the work of 1,350 poets); the entire corpus of Old English writing; whole novels by Austen, Dickens, Faulkner, Melville, Wharton and scores of others; Aesop's fables; treatises by Hobbes and Hume; several versions of Shakespeare's plays; dozens of works in Latin and other classical and modern languages; not to mention everything that Mr. Jefferson ever wrote.
But wait. Is this really reading? There's something sad, not to mention
awkward, about watching text scroll past on a glowing computer screen. On
further reflection, the giddiness I felt about "owning" thousands of pages of
e-text begins to fade as I think of my (imagined) library with its fireplace,
leather chairs and shelves of beautifully bound volumes. So. I was relieved
when Mr. Seaman
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opined that e-texts will never replace printed books entirely. "You can't take
an e-text to the beach or read it in the bathtub," he noted. Thus, my
dog-eared and much annotated copy of To the Lighthouse will never be
completely obsolete.
Despite the aesthetic appeal of my "real" book, I can also see how an on-line collection of all of Virginia Woolf's novels would allow me to approach her works in a new way. Thanks to the simple, yet sophisticated "search" mechanisms available in the universe of on-line texts I can easily find out how often the word "time" appears in one or more of Woolf's novels. Other questions can be posed, such as, do certain adjectives appear more frequently in earlier works than in later pieces? What are the stylistic differences between her private diaries and published essays? How does Woolf's use of the term "British Empire" compare with other writers of her time? Together the answers to questions like these could yield a fresh portrait of the author. Suddenly, problems that might have been too knotty for all but the most dedicated scholar can be asked and answered by an undergraduate. It may not be possible to beat an ordinary paperback for convenient, inexpensive and pleasurable private reading, but to engage in modern textual analysis, students at all levels will turn increasingly to on-line texts.
Jerome McGann, an English professor and one of the first fellows of the institute, envisions just such a gateway as he compiles a hypertext version of works by the 19th-century poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Pre-Raphaelite figure, who expressed his vision in both words and illustrations, is a particularly good subject for a hypertext. Future users of Mr. McGann's electronic archive will be able to see and compare handwritten first drafts with final printed versions of any of Rossetti's poems: view crisp, full-color images of his paintings; zero in on and enlarge portions of any illustration; and instantly place combinations of poems and paintings next to one another for on-screen comparisons. With this vast archive of material and the power to navigate through it easily, the possibilities for new approaches to Rossetti's work are limited only by the hypertext user`s imagination.
These modern marvels -- from e-mail to hypertext -- have something in common. They all blur the lines between writer and reader, between teacher and student. I'd like to imagine that Thomas Jefferson would approve of the "democratizing" force of these new technologies. After all, the very architecture of his university was designed to bring older and younger seekers of knowledge into proximity. Yet, there is a dark side to all the dazzle I've encountered. The immensity of these offerings is daunting. Sometimes I feel almost paralyzed by the ever-growing volume of riches at my disposal.
As the initial euphoria of moving into the electronic neighborhood wears off, I see that I am left with a familiar problem, now magnified a millionfold. Namely, how to decide what to read and what to ignore. The ability to make discriminations, to hone one's powers of discernment, is perhaps what is at the heart of all education. Will the computer revolution make even clearer what sages have known for millennia, that the beginning of wisdom is in the ability to make fine judgments? Perhaps. But for now, while I'm ready to sign the lease on my electronic cottage, I also plan to keep a room to myself where I can bake bread, paint pictures, listen to nothing but my own humming, and remain blissfully unconnected.
