HTML and the "Author Position"
Although the author value may be too slight a foundation for a full-scale discussion of Foucault's "author function" or Barthes' "death of the author," it can still provide a possible starting place for a discussion of what it means to be an author in a hypertext environment.
For example, in his discussion of the author function, Foucault notes that the concept of authorship only became viable "when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive" (124). In taking responsibility for the content of their pages by including their names in author values, students become more readily identifiable and also more readily subject to social "punishment" both in the form of official sanctions for copyright infringement or breaking university rules and in the form of social sanctions for "unacceptable" opinions or behaviors. Becoming authors in this sense is not without risk, particularly for students who choose to create content which conflicts with prevailing social conventions. Students who have never published their writing to a wider audience should be asked to consider what being an author in this respect may involve.
More generally, students who describe themselves as authors become part of the ongoing process of definition, of construction of the hypertext author. Eric Rasmussen, among others, has pointed out that this definition is necessarily in a continual process of reassessment:
Hypertext theories of authorship will necessarily stress the importance of authorial collaboration in the creative process of designing and building hypertexts. Hypertext authorship entails, of course, writing, but it also involves an array of aesthetic, digital-production techniques such as image manipulation, animation, audio editing, and coding. (14)
Having our students use meta tags to describe themselves as "authors" only begins the discussion here. As students begin to work with the various materials that go into the creation of a site, they can also begin to ask fundamental questions about the process of creation itself. What do words like "write" and "create" mean in this context? To what extent are they sole "creators" of their content, particularly content that is linked to other sites and other writers? And what really constitutes an "author" in the remediated space of the web?
Citation Format:
Batschelet, Margaret. "Learning To Love the Code: HTML As a Tool in the Writing Classroom." The Writing Instructor. 2004. http://www.writinginstructor.org/files/batschelet/
(Date Accessed).
Review Process: Margaret Batschelet's
hypertext was accepted for publication following blind, peer review.