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What is TextWeaver?

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Hypertext and Online Discussion

TextWeaver combines hypertext with online discussion in a single program. This experimental approach aims to enhance interaction and to make the archive of the discussion more useful as a learning resource. The original idea for such a combination of functions dates back to the 1980s. Andrew Feenberg's own contribution to those early discussions circulated in manuscript at that time.  

It seemed plausbile that hypertext would prove useful if stacks could be created while reading, much as we mark up the margins of books for later review. This was called "active reading." In practice this means that keywording should be performed by the eventual user of the archive for his or her own purposes, rather than by the authors of the texts deposited in the archive. 

Feenberg reached this conclusion after frustrating attempts to get students to keyword their contributions in a way intelligible to the whole class. Since this effort failed, he fell back on the idea of reader created keywords. No matter how confusing these might be to others, at least the person who created them should be able to understand them. We are tempted to call them "fuzzy" keywords to signify their lack of any kind of official status or rational form beyond the immediate needs of the reader. The TextWeaver project includes evaluation studies of the effectiveness of this approach.

Web Highlighter

Web Highlighter is a free utility offered by PC Magazine. It enables users to annotate web pages and save a list of annotations along with the corresponding URLs. To get Web Highlighter, go to PC Magazine Utilities.

A Note on Hyperbrowsing:

Web Highlighter is an example of what we call "hyperbrowsing." Hyperbrowsing allows users to create their own hypertexts out of the materials they view as they surf the web. TextWeaver is specifically designed for hyperbrowsing online discussion. We envisage its evolution into a new type of browser, the hyperbrowser.

Today's browsers permit one to collect "favorites" and to participate in newsgroups. What they don't do is let you create your own hyperlinked objects out of the things you read and the images and sounds you find on the pages you access.

Instead, unless we take the trouble to learn sophisticated web editing programs, we are supposed to wait for the computer or entertainment industries to create hyperlinked objects for us. Yet this is not really happening and we think it is a minor path not the main highway. Individual not corporate activity is what the Internet is all about!

So, let's think about TextWeaver in these terms. Imagine that instead of TextWeaver receiving a course list from the university, you could create "Topics" in the course pane. Each topic could have its own list of keywords which could be used to create links to objects found online relevant to the Topic. The keyworded pages are automatically downloaded. When one has finished researching a topic online, he or she will have a neatly organized survey of the field on the local computer. The survey can be displayed by accessing the Topic with the keywords as chapter heads, so to speak.

What this amounts to is separating and recombining several things: 1) editing web pages and reading them--we want to give some editing powers to readers; 2) surfing online and offline--the cache is pretty primitive and so unselective it can't hold much stuff, but we want to give offline the power of online.

If you have any comments on this vision, please share them. I find it inspiring!

Articles on Hypertext and CMC

Murray Turoff's homepage has two interesting articles on combining hypertext and computer conferencing. The URL is http://eies.njit.edu/~turoff/

The articles are: