Imagining an English Markup and Management Application

This paper discusses the inception of the “EngComp Markup” project and the place of EMMA (English
Markup and Management Application) generally within English Studies, the English Department as an
institution at the University of Georgia, and the English curriculum. College students and teachers recognize
already that writing today differs far from the undertaking it was prior to the information technology
revolution; they enter the University assuming that research is done on the Internet and that text is processed
on a computer. Documents are “engineered” as much as “Englished,” and, increasingly, composed of bits of
multi-media content. Grammar—the organizing of grammata, or “letters”—demands a new kind of
programmer. But while word processing is now the norm, English Departments and Writing Programs have
thus far lacked tools to deal with digital documents across their life-cycle. For the most part, it is still “papers”
that are due. Emerging technologies that utilize markup languages, however, will enable a fundamental shift
in the very nature of the production, examination, and distribution of text. Moreover, markup serves to relate
the heretofore incommensurate structures of narrative argument and database, with profound implications for
our conceptions of the organization and articulation of knowledge. Thus, markup has the potential to
rehabilitate university writing as a “product” by thoroughly transforming documents into text-in-process and
by integrating writing production, review, and evaluation into a single structure.