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nonlinear fictions
As promised, here's the second half of what I'm thinking of as my Well-Intentioned Hypertext Rant, in which I argue that even literary / narrative works that aren't traditional hypertext as such are often nevertheless designed to be rewardingly navigated in non-linear fashion (hypernavigated?). Ready? Here goes:
"[M]y [earlier] examples are all non-fictional, a little bit of a cheat on my part given that this whole thread got started discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of hypertext as a literary / fictional form. I'll grant that most fiction is designed to be read sequentially, although I'd point to the existence of a "scene selection" menu on nearly every DVD out there as evidence that people value and appreciate non-linear ways of navigating narrative as well. (I can only think of one filmmaker who has successfully resisted the popular pressure to segment the DVD release of their movies this way: David Lynch.)
This also gets a little trickier when moving out from the level of the individual text into a "mega-corpus" of related stories, or a storytelling ecology. If we were Star Wars fans, we might read Star Wars tie-in novels in the order of their publication, or in the chronological order that continuity prescribes, or just randomly: each contributes another puzzle-piece to the overall Star Wars mega-corpus in a way that traditional hypertext theory very tidily provides a framework for describing. Comics continuity works similarly: only the most hard-core X-Men collector(s) can even begin to make an attempt to read the overall "story" of the X-Men in the order in which it occurred: the vast majority of readers are instead navigating the mega-corpus in partial, fragmentary ways, assembling the logic of it as they go. Again, hypertext theory provides a very handy way of thinking about this kind of reading.
Mythic narrative systems work similarly: Dan [another commenter on the thread] observes that "[r]eligious texts can be read for narrative or as fiction, but that kind of reading generally doesn't involve skipping around." That's definitely true for the Old and New Testament, but less true for the heavily-annotated Torah, and even less true for pre-book mythic systems like the Greek, Egyptian, or African myths, which can be appreciated as fiction or narrative but have no coherent sequential order.
Thanks for putting up with me while I indulged my need to be this guy. Labels: comics, fandom, hypertext, narrative, spirituality |
Friday, March 07, 2008
1:00 PM
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hypertext as form vs. hypertext as technique
There's an interesting debate on the topic of hypertext happening at if: book right now, in which Ben Vershbow, the author of the post, makes the claim that hypertext is not viable as a literary form. Something about the post got my hackles up, and I began to feel like it hinged on a too-rigid definition of what "hypertext" is. I kicked the idea around for a bit, and came up with this as a response:
Hypertext may not be a viable literary form, but "hyperlinking" as a navigational technique is enormously successful, so much so that we take it for granted in our daily use of the Web, and forget how much of a debt it owes to the thinking of the "inner circle of [hypertext] devotees."
It is possible to say that any work of fiction or nonfiction that invites non-linear access, has hypertextual elements. When viewed this way, it's easier to see that there's no shortage of "viable" examples of enormously successful "hypertextual"-style works. Dan V. starts on this approach when he brings up Khazars or The Unfortunates, but I'd go further, including key texts of human civilization like the dictionary, the World Almanac, Mao's Little Red Book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, and the Koran, Bible, and (especially!) the Torah. (It's possible to read any of these books in linear order, but I'm going to argue that most people don't.)
(Full disclosure: if I overreach, it is possibly because I spent five years of my life working on a piece of serialized Web fiction that is essentially a linear narrative, but which contains hypertextual navigational elements, so the distinction between "hypertext as form" and "hypertext as technique" feels pretty deeply-grained to me.)
It doesn't yet get at the question of hypertext's viability as an explicitly literary form, but I'm working on that next. Labels: electronic_literature, hypertext |
Thursday, March 06, 2008
7:47 AM
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databases as works of art
Had a long, caffeinated discussion about databases this morning with CJO. What makes an effective database, what databases could be used for, etc.
This afternoon I find myself wondering: why is it that the database is not widely recognized as a form for artistic expression? There are certainly times when I feel like the index card file will end up being the best piece of creative output I will ever produce. And databases, in general, are oriented towards fragmentation, discontinuity, heterogeneity, montage, collage, and systematics—major governing principles of contemporary art.
Guy Davenport writes "A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible." The database is literally designed to be such a form. So where are the artists striving out in that direction? Milorad Pavic has produced at least one book that points the way...
I suspect there are hypertexts that qualify—almost all hypertexts have, as their back-end, arrays of lexia that could basically be thought of as existing in a sort of database form—although I'm hard-pressed to think of many hypertext works that actually function like databases. Where are the creative works that open within, say, Access, rather than running as independent programs with their own interfaces (such as those generated by a hypertext authoring tool like StorySpace)? Labels: databases, hypertext, indexing |
Saturday, August 21, 2004
2:29 PM
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i n t e r o p e r o p t a t a t i v e
Some time ago, when I was discussing the forerunners of hypertext, I mentioned Robert Grenier's Sentences, a work that consisted of 500 index cards, stacked inside an ingenious box, designed to be read in any order.
Yesterday I received an e-mail from Whale Cloth Press letting me know that a random-access electronic version of the complete work is available online. Fun little knots of language to mull over.
Today, browsing the archives of Ron Silliman's poetry weblog, brought to my attention last week by Geegaw, I stumbled upon a number of rather lengthy entries on Grenier, from which I learned about his recent scrawl poems, mysteriously simple line art pieces which strike me as both naive and holy. Labels: hypertext |
Monday, February 10, 2003
4:20 PM
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forms of electronic literature V
I haven't added to my "forms of electronic literature" list since July. At this rate it'll be a year-long project. Actually maybe not, as I only have one more big category left to deal with after this one.
Command-Line Literature
Command-line literature is a textual system that you navigate by entering prompts at regular intervals. Usually you and the system "take turns," creating a kind of dialogic effect. These sorts of systems were popularized by a series of interactive games produced by companies like Infocom, of which Zork is the best well-known.
Many pieces of command-line literature, including the Infocom works, are essentially hypertextual: that is to say, they are primarily composed of large units of pre-existing text (lexia) that the user navigates their way through. One key difference, however, is the nature of the user interface: most widely-known conceptions of hypertext take the link as the primary means of naviagation, rather than the address-driven mode that characterizes command-line literature.
An additional difference is that most command-line works use at least some generative element. No writer can possibly compose responses to cover every possible user input, and so generally certain computer subroutines are employed to handle statements that the system reads as nonsensical, yielding responses like the familiar "I see no X here."
When the generative element is foregrounded, the hypertextual element is correspondingly reduced, and the experience becomes less like navigating a text (less "literary," one could argue) and more like having a conversation. The key text to think of here is Joseph Weizenbaum's notorious ELIZA, and the generation of chatbots born in her wake.
Forerunners of command-line literature: the Turing Test, early AI research, early command-line-driven computer langauges, Will Crowther's ADVENT.
Labels: electronic_literature, hypertext |
Saturday, October 19, 2002
11:43 AM
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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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