University Times

Five centuries elapsed between the inventions of moveable type and the first desktop publishing software.

Yet, according to Bruce Dobler of Pitt's English department, the leap from Gutenberg to desktop was technological chump-change compared to the windfall of the Internet's World Wide Web — at least in terms of giving individuals and institutions equal access to writing and reading the published word.

Thanks to on-line magazines and other Internet forums, writers can bypass agents, editors — even writing professors — in reaching worldwide audiences, he said.

Dobler, working with Harry Bloomberg of Computing and Information Services, teaches a hypermedia course to magazine writing students. He said people sometimes ask why an associate professor of English and his students would get so caught up in the World Wide Web. "When you look at the Web, it's a gigantic engine for publishing to the world. I find this, as a writer, an irresistibly charming idea," Dobler said.

Besides transforming modern publishing, the Web is redefining research, teaching, advertising and communications, he noted.

Typing on a personal computer linked to the Assembly Room's projection screen, Dobler called up Pitt's "home page" on the Internet. Potential students throughout the world can tap into this material and see and hear, among other things: registration information, individual profiles of most of Pitt's full-time faculty, a short promotional film about Pittsburgh, and the text of a poem by Pitt faculty member Toi Derricotte.

(Users have the option of hearing a recording of Derricotte reading her poem; then users are invited to send their opinions of the poem to Derricotte via e-mail.) Internet dispatches from Kobe, Japan, following the recent earthquake there confirmed that the Internet has replaced ham radio as the primary source of instant news from disaster sites, Dobler said.

— Bruce Steele