How an <emma> Partnership with the Library Benefits First-year
Composition
Christy Desmet and Ron Balthazor
Department of English, Park Hall
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602-6205
cdesmet@english.uga.edu
rlbaltha@uga.edu
► A Natural Alliance
At the University of Georgia, the study of student citation
behavior in First-year Composition has led us to reflect on the
usefulness of such an alliance between Librarians, writing
instructors, and the FYC Program in general. For some time
now, Richard A. Lanham has been arguing that in the
information age, the library assumes a new centrality for
universities, becoming the focal point for gathering,
organizing, and disseminating texts. Particularly because
information has become plentiful and time short, the
library, as a textual clearinghouse, plays an entirely new
role:
In a digitized information society . . . digitized information is imminent and not
physically placed and, unlike the book, can be given away and kept at the same
time. In a world of databases, the library with the most units no longer wins. At
the same time, dispensing – the new economics of human attention – becomes
central. In an information-rich world where human attention is the scarce
commodity, the library’s business is orchestrating human attention structures.
(1997a 165; emphasis added)
Lanham sees the university library as gathering together virtually texts that range across
department and disciplinary lines. It democratizes education by orchestrating readers and
writers into a community that is no longer
divided by these artificial, institutionally drawn
lines. Like teaching, therefore, being a librarian
means working with students rather than texts,
helping them to refine what Lanham calls
“attention structures.” We agree with Lanham’s
position, but in our project examine instead how
the library’s role in “orchestrating human
attention structures” works within the discipline
of Rhetoric and Composition, which at the
University of Georgia is housed firmly within the English Department.
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At UGA, instructors, at their discretion, are encouraged to create assignments that
involve research, involving both print and digital sources. Our First-year Computer Lab
Orientation directs students to the Main Library’s Virtual Tour and includes introductions
to the online catalogue (GIL) and databases (GALILEO). Many instructors also arrange
for a librarian to conduct a personalized orientation for their classes, in the context of a
specific assignment. In this way, they can expect a higher level of research skill and
better evidence from their students.
► <em
mma>’s Role in the Project
The Citation study itself is made possible by <emma>’s rich potential as a database
structured with XML (Extensible Markup Language). While at this point not all 163
classes use <emma> regularly for document sharing and storage, we already have many
documents with which to work, and the database can only grow larger over time. Because
<emma> documents are stored in one place, they are easy to search. Because the database
is permanent, the data is not scattered to the four winds at the end of every semester.
<emma> editor with <worksCited> items marked
And because the documents are structured consistently with descriptive tags (in this case,
<worksCited>), the computer makes extracting the data needed by Librarians to evaluate
students’ citation habits faster and easier than it could ever be with paper documents.
Finally, when students log on to <emma> for the first time, they are asked whether they
would like their work to become part of an ongoing data set that can be studied by
researchers with Human Subjects permission. Working with the UGA Human Subjects
Office has greatly simplified the process of carrying on large-scale research over time
with <emma> documents.
One additional feature of <emma>’s operation allows our citation research project to not
only replicate earlier citation studies, such as that conducted at Cornell University, but to
take the analysis one step further. <emma> has the capacity to concatenate together
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related documents. In this case, <emma> can display as a single, composite document
teacher assignments and graded essays (comment plus grading rubric).
Assignment concatenated with commented essay
The researchers therefore can evaluate the students’ choice of sources within the context
of teachers’ assignments, students’ choices, and teachers’ evaluations of the final essays.
► Orchestrating Human Attention Structures: Where Library Research Meets
Composition Pedagogy
The goals of the Library Researchers and of the FYC researchers are
complementary, if different. But as we will suggest, the congruence between our goals
suggests, more broadly, that in a world of digital text both librarians and teachers are
orchestrating students’ “attention structures.” Furthermore, <emma>’s ability to
transform essays into databases suggests as well that XML markup has a positive role to
play in what Lanham calls the “economics of attention” (1997b).
The project’s principal goals, as defined in the Human Subjects proposal, are to
determine the following:
 What types of information are cited by students (e.g., websites, newspaper
articles, journal articles, books)?
 Does the University of Georgia Library own these items?
 What was the method of access, print or electronic, for sources other than
websites?
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But <emma> -- and especially <emma>’s ability to link assignment, essay with Works
Cited, teacher comments, and grading rubric – gives us not only statistical data (number
of citations and grades), but a wealth of narrative data to corroborate the statistics with an
analysis of the pedagogical context. We can ask questions of a more sophisticated nature,
such as:
 How did the teachers’ wording of her assignment affect students’ understanding
of research?
 What kinds of sources do teachers’ marginal and end comments suggest are
valued most highly by the First-year Composition Program?
 Is there a correlation between numbers of citations and grades?
 Does formal intervention of a librarian improve the quality of students’ sources?
Essay concatenated with grading rubric
In this way, we will be able to consider citation behavior within a holistic rhetorical
context.
In the Rhetoric and Composition literature, a small but significant number of scholars
recognize the importance of assignments to quality of student writing. Erika Lindemann
writes that “writing assignments are the essential backbone of your course. They define
the work you and your students will do and determine whatever readings and class
activities will support it” (2001 262). Lindemann suggests the following heuristic for
designing writing assignments:
 What do I want the students to do?
 How do I want them to do the assignment?
 For whom are students writing?
 When will students do the assignment?
 What will I do with the assignment? (220-21)
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From a pedagogical as well as a research perspective, <emma> allows teachers and
students to see whether essays have addressed the topics in the terms set out by the
written assignment. They can match assignments to comments and grades to make this
determination. On the other hand, <emma> also allows teachers and students to see
whether teachers are grading according to the assignment’s criteria. They can match
comments and grades to assignments. In a complete and complex way, <emma>
encourages the kind of sustained connections between reading (assignments, essays, and
comments) and writing (assignments, essays, and comments) that fosters selfconsciousness and a sense of ownership for written texts (Salvatori 1996).
To conclude, the simple act of bringing together teacher’s assignment, student’s essay,
teacher’s comments and grading rubric into one document through <emma>
accomplishes three major goals of writing pedagogy:
First, it makes both students and teachers more self-consciousness about what they write
and how they read the writing of others. In other words, the machine plays its own part in
orchestrating human attention structures.
At the same time, <emma>’s arrangement of these documents helps teachers and students
to read and write texts from a comparable perspective. Father Walter Ong argued that
writing, and more particularly print, distances readers and writers from their own words
and thoughts. Ong did not consider this a particularly beneficial effect of literacy; he
thought it worked against social community by isolating individuals (1982). By contrast,
the visual distance created by <emma>’s online displays does promote community by
allowing teachers and students to “see” all parts of essay-production from a comparable
point of view. Teachers and students see their words projected into the same conceptual
and physical place. They see, quite literally, the same thing.
Finally, bringing together the different parts of the “assignment-essay production-teacher
response” process helps all parties understand how these discrete items are linked
together in a pedagogical cycle. In this way, a project begun to satisfy the mutually
beneficial but different goals of university librarians and the First-year Composition
Program can end by helping both students and teachers do their jobs better.
Works Cited
<emma> http://www.emma.uga.edu
Lanham, Richard A. 1997a. “A Computer-Based Harvard Red Book: General Education
in the Digital Age.” Gateways to Knowledge: The Role of Academic Libraries in
Teaching, Learning, and Research. Ed. Lawrence Dowler. Cambridge: MIT
Press.150-67.
---. “The Economics of Attention.” 1997b. Michigan Quarterly Review 37.2. 270 ff.
Lindemann, Erika. 2001. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 4th ed. New York: Oxford
University Press.
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Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Salvatori, Mariolina. 1996. “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of
Composition.” College English 58.4: 440-5.
University of Georgia First-year Composition Computer Orientation.
http://www.english.uga.edu/freshcomp/Computer_Lab_Orientation_03/welcome.
html
For the website for this presentation, see
http://www.english.uga.edu/cdesmet/Library_Project/home.html