Theoretical Frameworks

In articles published in 2004 and 2005, Seamus Byrne and Ronald E. Day respectively acknowledged the pivotal role I played more than ten years earlier in applying Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of the rhizome to the emerging technology of hypertext, which shortly thereafter became the predominant technology of information access and exchange on the Internet:

...we have the same basic nature of the rhizome reflected in the web. This has been well covered elsewhere, notably in Kathleen Burnett's essay on hypertext as rhizome more than ten years ago (1993).
(Byrne 2003)

"Toward a Theory of Hypertextual Design", published in 1993, was my earliest articulation of a theoretical framework to examine the impact of the rapidly evolving technological landscape on information access and change. Between 1993 and arriving at FSU in 1997, I continued to develop this framework and to explore its applications in a series of conference papers.

Since tenure and promotion to associate professor, I have continued to publish in this area. "Rhizomorphic Reading: Literacy in a Digital World," co-authored with Eliza T. Dresang, applied the framework to explain changes in children's literature. It was published in 1999 in The Library Quarterly, one of the two top-ranked journals in the field. I developed the analysis further in "From Victorian Scrapbook to Contemporary Literary Texts: The Aesthethics of Paste-up and Children's Trade Book Production," a refereed conference paper presented in 1998 at the Children's Literature Association in Paris, France.

In 2001, in recognition of the influence of the theoretical framework, I was invited to contribute an entry to the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. "Rhizomorphic Reading: An Ergodic Literacy," published in 2002, extends the application of the framework to the analysis of adult as well as children's literature and initiates a discussion of the relationship between emerging technologies and 21st Century literacy. Since 2005, I have been conducting empirical studies (discussed in Empirical Studies of Technology Use) to test the application of the theory to explain the development of new cognitive abilities and skills that children appear to be developing as they navigate the changing technological landscape. In the short term, I expect that this work will result in a refereed journal article co-authored with doctoral candidates Bradley Compton and Suyoung Lim. In the long term, I plan to submit a proposal for a book on the relationship between emerging information technologies and changes in the social meaning of information.

More recently I have been working with Information Worlds, a theoretical framework developed by Dr. Gary Burnett (FSU) and Dr. Paul Jaeger (Maryland). This framework couples the work of our late colleague, Dr. Elfreda Chatman with that of philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and is discussed in the Social Meaning of Information section.