A Networked Archive

For our build-a-tool project, we decided to construct a full-text archive of this week’s articles, but to add nuance to the task at hand, we also decided to hyperlink key terms throughout the readings to illuminate the fluidity with which terms are used within this scholarly discussion of gene at large. A tour of our proposed tool starts with the homepage, on which viewers would see a word cloud of all of our key terms: ecology, social constructivism, genre, consensus, dissensus, authority, power, collaboration, abnormal discourse, exigence, conversation, technique, etc. Below the word cloud would be a search bar, which would also allow visitors the freedom to search based on author, subject, title, or publication date. We included this as an option because we feel that it would be essential if a researcher wanted to trace historical or theoretical turns in the field. So there are two points of entry into the archive from the home page: through the search bar or through the word cloud terms. If a researcher clicked on a term within the word cloud, he or she would then be redirected to that term’s placement within specific articles located in the archive. Once the researcher has the archived article on his or her screen, she then has the option of hovering over the blue, hyperlinked term, which would display the term’s guiding definition as it is employed within that article, and as it could generally be interpreted for that article’s argument. If the viewer chooses to click on the hyperlinked word within the article, rather than just hover over it, she is taken down yet another rabbit hole. She will be redirected to a page listing all the possible ways of defining the term across the various readings from this week.

We recognized from the outset that there was perhaps a limitation in the act of singularly defining a term as it is used within one article. The act of definition could imply a “closing off” of other potential meanings, and as we’ve witnessed across this week’s readings, particular theorists don’t necessarily define the term “genre” in a way that represents a conceptually closed or limited reading. For example, Miller’s explication of genre as a social act is perhaps the most expansive and allows room for other definitions to be subsumed within it. She writes, “If we understand genres as typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations, we must conclude that members of a genre are discourses that are complete, in the sense that they are circumscribed by a relatively complete shift in rhetorical situation” (159). However, throughout the course of the article, we also see genre operating as a classification system, and in more implicit ways, such as an ideology or a discourse system. Therefore, we recognize the potential limitations in deriving one seemingly static definition for each term, and also the risk we would be taking in ascribing implicit meanings to terms. To put it another way, it would be difficult to prevent subjectivity from infiltrating the defining process.

The rationale for defining terms within the text is that it creates, collectively, a dispersed glossary that allows the terms to be located both within their theoretical/ textual content, but also individualized within their own conceptual space, as you hover over them. We attempt to stymy this act of “closing off” meaning by having each hyperlinked term link to a page that features all of the definitions of a term that could be derived across this week’s readings. Devitt writes that formal views of genre make it into a “normalizing and static concept, a set of forms that constrain the individual; genuine writers can distinguish themselves only by breaking out of those generic constraints […]” (574). So we recognize that by cataloguing the term, we might also be imposing constraints on its meaning, but we still think that it would be useful for researchers to have these definitions floating within the text, at their disposable as they are making sense of the text they are reading. In this way, we create an intertext that threads the readings together. In many cases, we think that these definitions would yield more similarities than differences from our readings. For instance, defining the term “genre” as a social act in Miller doesn’t necessarily mean separating it from Berkenkotter’s definition of genres as “inherently dynamic rhetorical structures that can be manipulated according to the conditions of use,” at the same time that they are “best conceptualized as a form of situated cognition embedded in disciplinary activities” (477). The focus on cognition obviously nuances Miller’s definition, but we also can see Miller’s social constructivist definition of genre at work as well. Berkenkotter even explicitly draws on Miller, as well as many of the theorists mentioned throughout the readings this week: Bakhtin and Bitzer, for example. So in a way, there is already an existent intertexual conversation being generated by this particular arrangement of texts; however, defining our terms further enriches that intertext by allowing the viewer of our archive to note more readily the parallels and divergences among each term’s definition set.

We see this archive as a network of meaning. The terms are never intended to be read only singularly, but rather, we invite viewers to view the terms in isolation only to better understand the larger meaning created through the intertext. A potential hazard of our site is its complexity. It is in every sense a multi-layered tool in which researchers could get lost if they weren’t navigating smartly. However, these terms themselves are similarly multi-layered, and so we see our tool as a metaphor representative of these “layers” of context.