Building and Maintaining Links: A Review of John Miles Foley's Pathways Project

The Pathways Project (https://web.archive.org/web/20190212055743/http://www.pathway-sproject.org/) is an online, open-access digital counterpart to John Miles Foley's print book Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind (University of Illinois Press, 2012). The print version was published in August 2012, shortly after Foley's passing; the digital version's homepage was last edited in December 2011. The two versions overlap almost entirely in content to demonstrate the contrast between print and digital technologies at the core of Foley's argument. They are unique in the options each offers for interaction, the routes by which readers navigate them, and the epistemological experiences generated by the varying designs. The Pathways Project explores connections between the ways oral and digital technologies represent the fluid, networked nature of human thought, in contrast to the more rigid, linear affordances of print media.

The Pathways Project website features a wiki-style design navigated via either macro navigation bar options or linked text within each entry, with each page referred to as a "node." The interface tracks readers' progress as they move through the site via a networked "linkmap," showing the current page, the previously visited pages, and the linked pages a reader might choose moving forward. Readers may login to save or share their particular journeys through the site's many nodes, and the navigation sidebar offers suggested paths through especially significant content. Alternatively, readers might select the "Full Table of Nodes" option to read through the nodes sequentially in alphabetical order, which parallels the print book's organization. To read through the Pathways Project in sequential order, however, would be to miss the interconnected reading experience Foley deliberately foregrounds through his project's design; it is a work that is meant to be wandered rather than "read" in the traditional sense.

Because of its design structure, the Pathways Project can be a challenging work to engage without sufficient framing, which Foley acknowledges in the project's preface. This design draws attention to the conventions of print reading (otherwise frequently taken for granted) by stretching these conventions to their limits and contrasting them with the networked information structures afforded by oral and digital communication environments. The Pathways Project constitutes an innovative example of digital publishing in a folkloric context. It is a thought-provoking, potentially overwhelming, and intriguing text that pushes the boundaries of what digital scholarship in folklore might be, particularly in light of its relatively early (2012) publication date. However, its idiosyncratic nature has meant less uptake in subsequent folklore scholarship especially when compared to the print version, whether in light of the dense specialized vocabulary Foley invents (such as eAgora, oAgora, and tAgora for electronic, oral, and textual communication environments, respectively) or in light of its challenge as a born-digital book situated in a field that tends to favor print as a primary mode of delivery. (For a recent exception, see Robert W. Guyker, Jr., "Verbal Markets and Games in the eValuation of Myth, with an Appeal to Hermes, Aesop, and Virtual Worlds," Western Folklore 78:193–224, 2019.)

Given its density and relative idiosyncrasy, Foley's terminology may function less effectively outside the Pathways Project's tightly knit conceptual and technical ecology (Guyker's 2019 article, mentioned and cited above, is again an exception. The author applies Foley's three "agoras" as a cohesive analytical framework for mythic discourse across media environments via Greek mythological and literary figures). I suggest the project's greatest strengths lie in its design, and its commitment to demonstrating its arguments via two parallel iterations. In particular, I have found the Pathways Project to be a thought-provoking pedagogical resource for graduate courses. In a recent graduate section of "Writing for Social Media" rooted in folklore and narrative across media, for example, we explored the Pathways Project as a folkloric lens to consider how stories and other kinds of information travel across media spaces. Students found it challenging to engage the project alongside the other course readings, which helped us examine their sources of frustration to re...