Whether the discussion centers on Homer or the homepage, "the circular journey starts at home" (Internet Invention 75). This commonplace grounds the work of Gregory Ulmer from his development of mystory in Teletheory to its remake the widesite in Internet Invention.

The widesite is not so much a traditional narrative but the mapping of a temporal search, often centered on the creation, exploration, and solution of conflicts or problems. Just as the hero starts his journey from a point of stasis in his home culture, the contemporary internet search for information begins at home. Originally, the metaphor of home on the web stood for a static beginning place, but with the proliferation of information on the web and of tools for developing, publishing, and finding it the point of departure can be anywhere. The (re)search process has no definitive disciplinary ground or limitations. Any information can potentially provide a solution to any given problem. In the general economy of the web, as opposed to the restricted economy of traditional disciplinary research, grounding values can't be assumed: they have to be invented. The goal of the widesite in Internet Invention is to develop and articulate one's own grounding values and identity as a place to begin the search for solutions to problems rather than simply accepting the default values of a culture or discipline.

This process, for Ulmer, is part of the traditional concept of education: students come to the university with the values of their home culture and have them challenged by new ideas. This challenge alienates them from their previous values, generating a sense of longing or homesickness. The typical ideal of liberal education is that the school provides the stage for developing a new unified set of beliefs and ideals—a new disciplinary home to serve as the basis for solving problems, for returning the home culture to stability. The problem Ulmer is confronting is the fact that in contemporary digital culture, cultural and disciplinary homes are not that stable and unitary. We no longer have one home, one starting place, one commonplace, but begin our searches from multiple places, places that aren't simply given to us but that we must compile, articulate, and map. Essentially, contemporary humans are perpetually homesick, and this mood or yearning motivates our searches. Traditional literate logic no longer provides the stable security it once did. A digital rhetoric must begin with multiple (re)beginnings.

This widesite began as a project for a graduate seminar on Rhetorical Invention back in 1997. At that time I was a graduate student studying rhetoric at The University of Texas at Arlington. The program at UTA was deeply involved in the cross-sections among rhetorical theory, composition, and post-structuralism. In the rhetorical invention course we moved from classical rhetoric through composition theory to post-structural models of invention. My final project for the course set out to both learn about and enact Gregory Ulmer's genre mystory from his books Teletheory and Heuretics. The problem to be solved was deciphering and implementing Ulmer in a way that connected my own life to that search. Enacting mystory, more often than not, generates an affective connection between the (re)searcher and the problem. It was through this course and project that I decided to be a professor of rhetoric and composition and to write my dissertation on the history of composition theories and rhetorical invention.

As an assistant professor at George Mason University teaching rhetoric, composition, and digital writing, I had been talking about and using mystory, or versions of it, in many of my classes but hadn't gone back to rethink, rework, or revise the original project. Initially the project was done for fun, and for learning, not necessarily to be a serious scholarly or even digital project, so I hadn't touched it since the graduate course. But once I started using Ulmer's more recent book Internet Invention to enact a more explicitly digital version of mystory, I finally decided to (re)join my students. In 2004 I began revising the initial mystory along with my students as they experimented with the genre. What appears here is a significant remake of the original hypertext into a widesite that I hope to continue to build, write, and think with. The more common place to start is Bystory, the more kairotic place to start is the index to the left, the more categorical place to start is the popcycle. In each case, all places lead home, and home leads everywhere.