Simplicity Becoming Complicated: Navigating Theoretical Turns via Dynamic User Participation

            Netty and I chose to create a tool in the form of an annotated bibliography with a certain twist, one that I think neither of us had seen explicitly before in extant bibliographic tools. We wanted a bibliography that could categorize entries based on the critical intertextual relationships of the kind that we have been exploring together as a class since day one. The idea was deceptively simple, which I think became more complicated as planning the tool took shape. Our idea was to use hashtags modeled after the key questions that we ask in class discussions and our intertextual conversation assignments. Does one theorists' work represent a turning towards, a turning away from, a disruption, continuance, etc., of another theorists' work? A hashtag such as #respondsto, #complicates, or #turningtowards could be applied to a bibliographic entry in order to explicitly related one author's work to another author's, or to larger paradigms or trends in the field of composition, such as process or stage models, or certain pedagogical strategies. Not only could users of this tool search the hashtags for trending topics, as users of social media sites are accustomed to doing, but they could also locate associated relationships between authors, works, etc.

            The apparent simplicity of this idea becomes complicated once you imagine the overwhelming variety of relationships of this kind that explicitly or implicitly exist. It takes a lot of time not only to read the author's works and recognize these relationships, but to catalog them in this tool may be a challenge for a person working alone. Fortunately, in order to make the tool accessible to users, we decided to store it online in a wiki form because wikis allow users to collaboratively produce and modify information over the web. The decision to use a wiki to publish the tool opened new possibilities in terms of audience and purpose for the tool. We had in mind that the tool would be designed for an audience of users not unlike all of us, many of whom are grappling with these shifting compositional theories for the first time. Having a tool that highlighted some of these critical questions, turns, and relationships between texts and authors would certainly be useful. Rather than doing the work for us, it could potentially expedite our journey. However, since the tool exists within a wiki, the journey is decidedly not a passive one for the users. They have the power to create and reshape the relationships between entries by critically evaluating them as they explore. The dynamic nature of the tool was to some extent accidental; it certainly emerged as we worked together to plan it and composed our plan together.

            I suppose I cannot help but think about the collaborative or social aspects of writing when doing these exploratory assignments because they are always undertaken with a classmate. One of the issues that the class discussion on Tuesday illuminated for me was the apparently missing elements in Flower and Hayes' model. From what I recall, several of us took issue with the failure of the model to account for writing as a social process. Not having read Flower or Hayes' later works, I do not know whether they eventually addressed this discrepancy, but I am curious how they might respond to these perceptions. Even if the model solely represents the cognitive processes of an individual, where would collaborative, social interactions that occur during the writing process exist within the model? The only three places that make sense to me are the monitor, the writer's long-term memory, and the task environment. None of these choices is entirely satisfying, hence the debate in class and in other texts. However, there is another simpler explanation for how social processes in writing fit in the model. While I agree that it is of limited usefulness to have a model that tries to generalize cognitive processes across all individuals who write, I think it is reasonable to treat the model as such; that is, a model for cognitive processes within an individual. It could be adapted to account for social processes by multiplying the model by the number of individuals whose compositions are socially linked. Then the models could be bound by circles and arrows drawn between them. In this way the model retains its dynamism.