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new trends in electronic literature IV
Hypertext & Hypermedia.
Okay, hypertext isn't exactly a "new trend," but it is a form that's key to thinking about the other types of electronic writing, so it's worth discussing here if only to round out my taxonomy. To many of you this will be old hat.
A hypertext is a text broken up into several chunks. Traditionally the various "chunks" are textual in nature, although they can be images or sounds as well (only then you'd properly use the term hypermedia). George Landow, probably hypertext's most important academic booster, uses Roland Barthes' term lexia to describe these chunks, although they're also referred to frequently as "nodes," and the Deleuze and Guattari fans out there might prefer "rhizomes."
These chunks can be traversed in a variety of ways, and the traversing mechanisms are generally refered to as links. The various connections between the nodes and links can be represented as a web. If you're reading this page, all of these terms are no doubt familiar to you, and one could argue that the World Wide Web is in fact a single gigantic multi-authored hypermedia work.
To qualify as hypertext, there should ideally be a degree of interactivity involved, and the work should ideally have a certain nonlinear dimension. After all, one could argue that a traditional novel, broken into chapters, is organized into lexia, but since those lexia are designed to be read in a linear manner (links are notably absent) any interactive element is essentially negligible.
Some people treat hypertext and electronic literature as essentially interchangeable. Early attention given to hypertextual electronic authoring tools such as StorySpace or HyperCard helped to cement this conception. But I think it's inaccurate, and certainly some of the other types of electronic writing that I've outlined in the past, such as computer-generated narrative or language films lack one or more of the key elements of hypertext.
Examples of hypertext abound, but well-known hypertext narratives include Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story, Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl, and Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden. (All three of these were written using Storyspace, and require a CD-ROM to experience, although an abridged version of Victory Garden has been adapted for the Web, here).
Forerunners include: Choose Your Own Adventure books; Robert Grenier's Sentences; B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates; Robert Coover's nonlinear short stories (such as "The Babysitter"); Cortazar's Hopscotch; Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths;" Ted Nelson's Literary Machines, Dream Machines, and Project Xanadu; Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think"; tools for non-linear access of traditional texts, such as indexes, page numbers, concordances; early ergodic or non-linear texts such as the I Ching. Labels: electronic_literature, hypertext |
Wednesday, July 03, 2002
3:35 PM
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