My pedagogical question is how can the student writer learn from the DJ? To answer my question, I want to perform the experiment which tests the claim. As Gregory Ulmer has written, often the best method for explaining a theory is to perform the theory. Performing one's theoretical position encompasses the general project of rhetoric, for rhetoric deals with the production of discourse.
What I want to do, then, is become a DJ here, to transform my initial theoretical thoughts regarding a new composition practice by performing it. In this sense, the writer, and in our classrooms the student writer, takes on the dual role of performer and critic, interacting with the content of her writing as well as its form.
Because the DJ's instrument for writing, the sampler, is a computer, a cut and paste machine meant for juxtaposing unlike sounds, I propose that this performance (i.e. the text you are reading) uses hypertext to demonstrate sampling as a model for a critical writing practice. In this sense, hypertext is treated as more than a "non-linear" method of writing (which has been the traditional approach to creating hypertexts as criticism). In this essay, links are not about creating alternative narrative structure, but rather about creating a juxtaposing writing practice.
Sampling, then, acts as the model which I base my writing upon. I am not performing music but rather extrapolating from the model a generalizeable practice. The sampling occurs at the level of the text itself (the mix of four disparate fields of study, which I will detail shortly) and at the level of the various pop up hyperlinks in this essay, all of which share temporal affinity.