This is a literature map that I drew in preparation for a comps question that asked me to sketch the foundations of the field and map transitions between the periods when we called ourselves computer-mediated communication, Internet studies, and new media. It was challenging to prep for, since I knew I needed to cite the literature from 1945 forward while keeping the list to a length I could discuss in two hours. There’s nothing inherently post-worthy about that. The map isn’t comprehensive; I kept adding stuff in my mind (McLuhan, for instance) and making minor switches between areas. What’s interesting to me are two things I learned in the process.

1. I’ve always claimed that concept mapping doesn’t work for me. I’ve played around with Cmap and other, similar programs for years and even made pretty maps with them, but I didn’t find the process particularly useful or generative. (Which is not to say that I would ever discourage my students or anyone else from such things.)

When I was writing my thesis prospectus, my advisor and I staked out an empty classroom with a huge whiteboard and I wrote all over the thing while we argued. When we got done, I had a real, actual plan. The argument was part of it, but a very significant component of it was just having a huge, erasable space to fiddle with. I’ve tried to recreate that in my home study* over the past few years, writing on small whiteboards and the windows. (Since I rent and the landlord spackled the walls with stucco-ish stuff, I can’t write on my walls. Plus, I’d be too lazy to paint over it when the project was over. And it’s too permanent — half my walls would be scratched out.)

So I went out and bought a set of multi-colored, fine felt-tips and the biggest pad of newsprint I could find. I spent a morning making the thing at the top of this post. It seems that the value of mapping shows up for me when 1) I’m doing it in actual, physical handwriting and 2) there is an undefinable but sufficient amount of physical space to write on. Bright, varied color also seems central, even though that first board-map I did was just in black dry-erase marker. The act of writing it out by hand provided a clarity that I haven’t found in many other processes and seared it in my brain. When I’m babbling in a nursing home and can’t remember my own name, I’ll still be able to tell the nurses that Vannevar Bush wrote “As We May Think” and it was published in the summer of 1945 in the Atlantic. And what it has to do with Wikipedia and networked writing.

2. Some of you will probably find that last fact unfortunate for a number of reasons, some of which depend on what you value in the literature. Derek and I have been progressing in our programs at roughly the same rate for the same amount of time, and he was cool enough to post his reading lists awhile back. It’s amazing to me that two people studying in the same general area in programs that are both assumed to be in the same general field would be trained so differently. (Not superiorly or inferiorly, just differently.) Part of it, I think, is that my department has a much heavier emphasis on scientific and technical communication, which drives the social/psych and e-health emphases in my list. Part of it is that one of my Internets Advisor’s hobby horses is deep citation of the field. Part of it is just that our advisors have very different research interests, were trained in very different ways themselves, and come from slightly different academic generations.

So I’m wondering if we Rhet/Comp folks who study Internet-related topics agree on any texts that would be essential to the field? What are the things that you would expect every job candidate in this specialty to have read? I’d be surprised if someone didn’t know Bush, Licklider & Taylor, Landow, Lessig, Ong, McLuhan (but which McLuhan?), Bolter, and Turkle. I suspect that Collin and Rice would say Manovich and Selber, among other things. What else?

*When I buy a house, I am putting a classroom-sized whiteboard in the hallway outside my study, assuming it won’t fit inside.