Walker, Janice R. «Fanning the flames: Tenure and promotion and other role-playing games.» Kairos 2.1 (1997). < http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/2.1/binder2.html?coverweb/walker/intro.html> 24 January 2014
What first strikes me is that this article is old. Ancient in Web chronology. As the article has a long row of «@»s below the title, I assume it is an indication of the original window width, so I adjust my browser accordingly.
Walker argues in a rhizomatic hypertext that electronic work should be valued in its own terms in tenure reviews — a recurring topic in Kairos. The text is strewn with links, and the author stresses that she wants user to get lost in the hypertext.
There is a table of contents available through the «chicken» button at the bottom of every page, but the author states her hopes that it will not be used, so I refrained from using it. The graphic at the bottom of each page looks like a navigation bar from the 1990ies, but this is a trick: The buttons link to different places on every page, selected randomly.
Some in-text links lead to bibliographic information in the list of works cited, some lead to other web sites (most of which are no longer online, alas), some lead to other pages in the same work (typographically similar, so it is difficult to understand the hierarchy of pages, if any), some lead to media files (a cartoon, a sound clip), and some lead to footnotes. A reader can hardly ever tell where the link will end.
Practice helps, however. After reading a while, the reader might notices that the links «justify» and «value» always go to the same pages within the hypertext, although other words (such as «change») may also be anchors for links to the same pages.
Links are generally mid-sentence, which makes for a quite difficult kind of reading.
Coloured text is used to show structure in one place.
While hoping to write rhizomatically, Walker does not always meet the goal. In the page «Tenure and Promotion and Other Role-Playing Games,» she writes that «Our third choice, then, is […]» without telling what the first two are, implying a reading sequence that I happened not to follow. The overall structure of the hypertext is actually quite easy to recognize. There is an «introduction» and a «conclusion,» and then three other main pages. The three main pages spell out three different policies electronic writers may want to follow, and these are listed in the introduction and summed up in the conclusion, bot times with hyperlinks to their pages. In addition, there are one page with notes and one with works cited, and two different tables of contents.
