What would it mean for our literary, cultural studies, and history classrooms to be modeled on the science department's laboratory instead of the eighteenth-century salon or Socrates's dialogues (to name only two familiar models)? The experience of constructing dictionary/anthology hypertexts is closer to the experience of the biology lab than it is the traditional English or history classroom: the students are asked to look at a wide variety of cultural productions and then to define, classify, and catalog their observations. Certainly all strong scholarship across the disciplines requires these skills, but the hypertext project, like the biology lab, emphasizes them over other goals. In this manner the laboratory model restructures the relation between the students and the object of study.
Also underscored in both the science lab and "hypertext lab" is the foregrounding of methodological concerns. In the lab report students are traditionally required to consider how the methods and procedures of the biological experiment affect its outcome and their truth claims; similarly, the hypertext dictionary project disrupts the taken-for-granted assumptions common to the methodology and procedures of the traditional seminar paper and even the tradition seminar discussion. Students can be asked to think about, defend, and criticize the proficiencies and knowledges required by this novel form.
Not only does the "hypertext lab" redefine the relationship between student and object of study, it also restructures the relationship between the students themselves. Because of the scope usually required of such "dictionaries," students are fruitfully obligated to work collaboratively while the instructor facilitates and guides them. In this manner the classroom is decentered with the students as the primary producers of both the objects of study and the knowledge concerning those objects. The collaborative opportunities of such projects can also extend beyond the first stage of small groups of students working together. First, web sites can easily be publicized and projects may often more easily serve a real scholarly audience -- seldom the case for undergraduate and even graduate seminar essays. Also, sites -- like long-term lab experiments -- can be continued by different groups in successive semesters: the dictionary can always be expanded and the project never fully comes to completion, never reaches a totalizing conclusion.
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