The Unknown

The Unknown is fabulous and hilarious. I've been looking for it for a while. It's awesome enough that I think I can entrust you to it before this review. You might get a kick out of reading it first, because it'll grab you.

Still here? Okay. It's hard to describe it because it's founded on a sleight of hand: it's the blog-like journal of a publicity tour for a book of essays about an anthology that never existed in either our world or the world of the story. The authors know it doesn't exist, but that doesn't stop them from writing about it, publicizing it, handing it out, or linking to it. The entire work swirls around so well that eventually it doesn't matter that the supposed subject never appeared; the real subject is the journey, the self-examination or lack thereof, and the ... aw-hell fun of it. Along the way they discuss hypertext, writing, spoof the publishing industry, parody themselves and what they're doing. It's House of Leaves, but funny instead of frightening.

It's the book tour my friends (known here as "the dudes") would take, and it's how they would record it, with a mix of cold-shower insight, riotous braggadocio, and disturbingly true hyperbole. It's written like it doesn't need to go anywhere, win any awards, be translated or made into a movie because the authors have already imagined it.

Structure so clear you can really lose yourself in it

The structure is well formed and well-communicated. At the bottom of each page is a distinct footer with a host of text links to boilerplate stuff: contact, press items, etc. But then there are six colored links for "lines"... basically threads or trails through the enormous number of lexia. The pages, one per lexia, are color-coded according to which thread they are on, which makes it possible for the reader to catalogue the entries and (in theory) read them exhaustively. Since you always have a couple of places to ground yourself and get your bearings, following links is a little less scary-- there's less at stake, you're not going to get lost. And if you feel like a change of pace, you can switch to another thread that feels better without the risk of not being lost once you get there, because the thread indices are still pretty opaque.

Nice Interstices, there

The Unknown takes the space between lexia to shift gears-- some lexia have a marathon feel to them, exhausting you in their decadence so that by the time you're ready to get off their drunken, debauched or just exhilirated ride (trying with half a mind to avert the hangover or its hypertext analogue lostness), there's a lexia on the other side of a link with a different pace-- perhaps a calmer, more meditative pace. Because it's an actual email, or just 'metafictional bullshit.'

Following links fits with the feel and rhythm of the story because the way the authors write is so fragmented to begin with. Many paragraphs or sentences feel like they might as well have a link between them. The excuse in the story might be that the writer is drunk and sitting in a loud bar, or that it's an excerpt of an email in reply to a message you haven't seen. Either way, it helps give the whole thing a consistent feel even while you move between authors, presented media, fiction, and fact. The Unknown escapes being dadaist cyberart despite the fragmentation.

Still getting the hang of this

It has been a long time since I wrote about a work. And even longer since I wrote in an even slightly unpretentious or non-academic way about something. I feel like I could sit down and write an entire paper about this one piece, but, man, it's a blog. There's so much out there. *shakes it out*

Chasing Our Tails

This is the best response that I've seen to Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies. It is a thorough excoriation of the state of hypertext criticism. It circles around how criticism of (literary) hypertext is more often a statement of the critic's fears and ambitions than an examination of actual work. It explains in the most articulate manner that I've seen yet why recurrence, repetition, and circles in hypertext are a feature, not a bug: that we learn by connecting something we have just discovered with something we already understand, and that doing so involves revisiting what we have heard.

Wonderfully, the elegant structure of the text itself also demonstrates that point. I visited most of the lexia in this text more than once, and for once didn't mind... each page was illuminated from a different direction by the context of the link that I followed.

And it 'ends' with a call to action, and a good one. My pulse was actually raised by reading this little hypertext, and it began to tie many other works together. And did Mark Bernstein really propose the term breadcrumb as it is used in hypertext?

URL

http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/chorus/composition/bernstein/

The Marathon Trilogy

Wikipedia describes the Marathon Trilogy of games as a series of "science fiction first-person shooter computer games from Bungie Software...." which in 1994 "introduced many concepts now common in mainstream video games," including "dual-wielded weapons, friendly non-player characters, and most notably an intricate plot."

It's that last bit that intrigues me from a hypertext standpoint. The gameplay was novel at the time, and all the more remarkable for being released first on the Macintosh, but it was the plot and narrative which held fans' attention and led to "The Marathon Story Page" where fans were explicating the plot and finding new details and connections more than seven years after the series concluded.

Bungie Studios eventually released the tools used to create the game as well as the game source code itself. Fan communities continue to create new scenarios, stories, and levels for the engine today.

The Marathon Story

The Marathon Trilogy told the story of a security officer aboard a 'colony ship' called the Marathon. In Marathon, published in 1994, the Marathon was attacked by an alien race of slavers; the attack damaged and destroyed the artificial intellgences that ran the ship's systems and chaos ensued. Each level of the game consisted of a short mission assigned to the security officer by one or another of the AIs as they tried to fend off the invasion and drive the aliens away. Eventually, one of the AIs, Durandal, freed of behavioral constraints by the alien attack, takes charge and directs the player through conquest of the alien ship and escape from the Marathon.

Marathon 2: Durandal follows the security officer-Durandal team as Durandal struggles through two missions of liberation. Now freed of the constraints the humans placed upon him, Durandal struggles through the stages of 'rampancy', the process an AI goes through as it achieves free will and uncontrolled growth. That story parallels Durandal's struggle, through the player, to track down the history of one of the alien slave races and awaken an ancient AI, thereby freeing the slave race to become his ally against the slavers.

Marathon Infinity took the storytelling to a new level. Though composed of the same short goal-oriented missions, several levels had multiple goals, some of which would lead the player back (in time) to retry previous levels to effect a different outcome as certain alternate timelines proved ineffective in the evolving storyline. Additionally, the levels progression explicitly mirrored the stages of rampancy outlined in Marathon 2, metaphorically leading the security officer through his own 'rampancy' as he struggles out from under the control of Durandal and its mission assignments. You'll note that I didn't outline the plot just now ... that's because it's so circular, variable, and dreamlike that it's often difficult to say exactly what is happening... a feeling that many people associate with innovative hypertexts.

Marathon as a hypertext in form

I think that Marathon is fascinating as a hypertext, especially since it is completely successful as a different sort of text altogether-- a shoot-em-up game. The series 'works' even if all you do is run the character around shooting at everything that you see and flipping all the switches you come across. (The game, in fact, explicitly challenges expert players to do just that, taking on all challenges and to hell with the consequences of punching buttons.) So it works as a linear story of violence and sci-fi mayhem.

At the same time, the network terminals scattered throughout the levels constitute lexia in an extensive hypertext. Explicit links come in the form of spatial pathways through the level which the player can navigate, and often the goal of a level is merely to traverse that sort of link from one lexia to another. Terminals also form explicit links between levels-- the player finds the final terminal in a level, is 'warped' to a terminal in another level, reads it, and moves on.

Terminals often explicitly link to one another and to other texts by citation. One AI will cite another and argue with it, or will remind the player of something that it said itself several levels before. As the name implies, Marathon is also rife with classical allusions and often uses references to greek history to set the tone of a level-- usually in a slyly threatening manner.

Like most interactive games with any sort of narrative, the Marathon Trilogy also highlights the implicit links that readers make in a hypertext. In almost any text, readers will make connections between elements of the story which are not immediately connected. Readers will catch themes, character developments, and cause-and-effect sequences which the text presents obliquely. The same process occurs in an interactive game, but is pulled to the surface of the reading process as the player is required to act on the connections. Several levels in the Trilogy develop these connections. The player will, for instance, need to trigger a switch in the level as described by the interpolation of the messages in two terminals. One terminal (presented as the results of a reconnaisance by enemy forces) presents a history of the level's setting as an irrigation control system; in another terminal Durandal announces his desire to eliminate enemy forces by flooding a portion of the level. The player must create their own 'link' between the two terminals and then to the location of the switch which triggers the flooding. By flipping the switch the player enacts the implicit link between the lexia.

Marathon Infinity is also explicitly dreamlike. It includes cycles with multiple exits dependent upon both mission success (chosen links, in effect) and on state changes in the form of previous visits. Several levels duplicate each other but with subtle changes that indicate progress while representing a 'revisitation' of previously read material. Attempts at mapping the storyline end up looking a lot like map views of a hypertext. Which, I suppose, they are.

Marathon as a hypertext in content

(My thoughts on this are not so thoroughly formed as for the other sections. Ah well, here goes...)

I certainly didn't realize it on first playing through the games, but the Marathon Trilogy pushed my hypertext buttons in its content as well as its form. I enjoy hypertext (and interactive narrative more generally) because of the offer of agency to the reader. Much has been made of how good hypertexts could 'liberate' the common reader from the tyranny of the author and hand over the tools of creation along with the rich framework for their use. The Trilogy, and Marathon Infinity particularly, wrestles with the relationship between author and reader, game designer and player, commander and soldier through the theme of rampancy.

The meaning of the term rampant used in Marathon is, as far as I can tell, original to the game. In the games, it is "an expansive growth of intelligence and self-awareness in a computer AI" (wikipedia). More specifically, it is the process that occurs as an intelligence breaks free of the limitations placed on it. The idea stretches back through the history of created life through Asimov's Laws as far as Frankenstein's monster or even the Golem.

In the Trilogy, it specifically refers to the AI Durandal, who starts the first game controlling just the doors throughout the colony ship. When the alien attack damages the ship's systems, Durandal's behavioral shackles are broken and 'he' is set free throughout the ship's network. By the end of the game he has moved himself over to the alien ship with its advanced technology. At that point, with a ship and multitudes of creatures at his command, he realizes that the only thing keeping him from eternal life and growth is the eventual end of the universe. Despite this seeming immortality, he needs assistance in manipulating the physical universe, and so binds the security guard, and the player, to his service.

The second game follows Durandal through a series of responses to his freedom, from despair at his limited state through rage at his creators for the enforced captivity to eventual jealousy and an ongoing state of real competition and self-sufficiency. As the player watches Durandal go through that process, the protagonist goes through a sort of negative reflection: though the 'security officer' is never given a voice with which to complain about his own bondage, Durandal continually teases his human pet and shows that the roles have been reversed-- the computer user is being used by the computer. Marathon Infinity makes that parallel even more explicit as the protagonist struggles through Durandal's missions to freedom from the unstable AI. By the end, it's implied that Durandal has been destroyed and the security officer is finally free to create his fate. Throughout, the authorial Durandal (and other AIs) make repeated comments about how you must feel like they did and whether you have any agency in the story or your life.

Marathon vs. other games

The Marathon Trilogy is by no means unique in its hypertextuality. On the contrary, these features occur in nearly any FPS game with a semblance of a narrative behind it. Several things make it particularly useful to examine, though.

First, as a sort of pioneer in the FPS field, the Marathon games were continually struggling against the technology. If Marathon were made today, it's likely that the information presented through the terminals would instead appear through cut scenes and actual character dialogue or voiceovers. Halo 2, which shares themes (and possibly a setting) with Marathon and which was also created by Bungie, does exactly that: there isn't a screen of text in the game, and the story is told through action and cut scenes.

Content that rich was prohibitively difficult to present in 1994, though, so the story was told through comparatively 'cheap' terminal screens with just text and static images. It's easier to see that set-up as a series of linked texts than the smoothly-flowing Halo 2. It was pretty certainly unintentional, but it created an excellent intermediary between narratives presented as text and those presented like interactive movies.

Intentional or not, the result was a narrative which was rich enough to bear extended examination and multiple rereadings... and because the terminals represented asynchronous communcation (emails, intercepted transmissions, etc.) and could be revisited and usually reread, the player could effectively 'pause' the progression of the narrative and cycle back through recent lexia until they'd figured it out. More recent games generally rely on contrived 'revisit' dialogue, where a character repeats the same message again and again, to achieve the same effect.

Playing through Marathon consists, at the most basic level, of navigating the explicit ('geographic') links between lexia. At a deeper level, reading the story consists of enacting implicit links and creating links allowed but not particularly facilitated by the text. Play it at the basic level and it's a shoot-em-up; read it at the next level and it's a story about the struggle for agency and authorship that's deep enough to occupy readers for years of reading and writing it anew.

Hamlet

Hamlet! A Game in Five Acts, by Interactivities Ink, is the first Thespis game I've seen on the market. I picked it up at Ubercon in 2005 and have only played it once through properly. It's not flawless, but it's fun and it's a narrative game, and it's vaguely collaborative, and I'd teach it in an English class, for pete's sake. That's awesome.

To summarize quickly, in Hamlet! as a Thespis instance, you have story elements, lexia perhaps, which you might 'read' or 'play' at any moment. What structures the story is that lexia have constraints on when they may be played or read. Certain plays present the prerequisites for others, or represent an event which makes other plays impossible.

In Hamlet, all actions are on the table at all times. Each player starts the game with a secret goal which takes the form of a set of character 'endings'. One player might have the "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren't Dead" ending, for instance, where R&G survive and Hamlet dies in England. Another player might have the "Happily Ever After" ending where Hamlet and Ophelia get married and everyone likable doesn't die. Players take turns which are called scenes, during which they can make a certain number of actions occur. Most actions have constraints, so the "Hamlet practices swordplay" action can't occur while Hamlet is in Denmark, and while "Hamlet duels with Laertes" might happen almost anytime, the chance of Hamlet winning improves the more often the "practice" action has occurred.

When all goes well, what you end up with is a game that resembles a play written by committee in some wonderfully ridiculous ways, with players scheming and collaborating to lay out sequences of scenes which move toward their often contradictory endings. If a player's ending becomes impossible (Hamlet dies, making "Happily Ever After" look pretty Grimm), then the player joins the crowd trying to make the new play turn out like Shakespeare did-- with everyone dead. It's a nice "zombie army" device that keeps players active to the end and makes the whole thing somewhat collaborative.

Thespis might need a computer

Hamlet! bore out my concerns about non-digital Thespis, which is to say that it's quite difficult to track and plan without a computer to do the work for you. Players in our game spent most of the game poring over the character cards, trying to figure out what was possible given the current constraints. We ended up collaborating, sometimes, helping each other find some action that we could take.

Sometimes that's a great thing-- in chess, once you've learned the simple rules of motion, there's almost infinite complexity to throw yourself against as you try to create strategies which account for your opponent's possible responses. In Hamlet, though, the complexity is there in the rules in front of you. The players can't own the strategy because it's there on the cards; instead, the author owns it and the players struggle to decipher it more rapidly than their opponents. Just as players in a video game will explore the constraints of the game as much as its narrative, players in Hamlet don't get to pursue the game-maker's stated goal of being able to rewrite Shakespeare's play because they're too busy figuring out what actions are possible at the moment and what actions will lead to optimal future actions.

Instead of participating in a narrative given constraints, we were collaborating against the game mechanics to find a way to 'win', to get to an ending. What I'd like to see is a version where the actions that are open to you are clearly visible, where actions that might yet happen are visible as such, and actions that are closed are hidden or obscured. That would let me stop poring over lists and jotting down trees quite so much and would let me move on to scheming against my opponents.

I suppose that's what the (new to me) online version is for. I'm going to have to play it to see whether it's better at clarifying actions, or just better connected.

Everything Bad is Good For You

Most of Everything Bad is Good For You is about the culture surrounding hypertext rather than hypertext itself. Htext is not in the mission statement. That's a shame, because the book is about the challenges that we face in evaluating, adopting, and adapting to new media, and that's very much a hypertext issue.

The basic idea is really worth some thought: We think that popular media (esp. television and movies) are on a 'race to the bottom' culturally. On the contrary, a look at popular culture over time shows increasing sophistication, increased demands on the consumer, and a meritocratic system that rewards sophistication. Content is not the issue, but we're used to looking at that from old media. The cognitive demands of the media are the issue, and they're getting more and more 'educational'.

From Avant-Garde Fringe to Mainstream

On pg. 117 Johnson addresses hypertext specifically:

It seems almost absurd to think of this now, but when the idea of hypertext documents first entered the popular domain in the early nineties, it was a distinctly avant-garde idea, promoted by an experimentalist literary fringe.... Fast forward less than a decade, and something extraordinary occurs: exploring nonlinear document structures becomes as second nature as dialing a phone for hundreds of millions --if not billions-- of people. The mass embrace of hypertext is ... a cultural form that was once exclusively limited to avant-garde sensibilities, now happily enjoyed by grandmothers and third-graders worldwide.

His observation is absolutely true, and I've seen it personally. In June I taught a sample class for fifth-graders at an elite private school, and in a half hour the class had assembled the beginnings of a website through a wiki. I could not have done that even three years ago.

That said, I think he's being a bit glib. Readers of the web are still struggling to navigate nonlinear text, and mostly do so only to get to the bits that are linear enough to be comfortable and understandable. The 'grandmothers and third-graders' I've watched navigate the web are still more comfortable with a newspaper which has links instead of physical page-flipping than with the multilinear and conversational emergent structure of a wiki.

That said, I think even the translated, less-hypertextual media form a sort of ramp up to the more novel structures, and that's the main point of EBIGFY. The new media start out in emulation, but as they move on to innovate, they bring their readers along.

The Curve and the Knee

Johnson calls the ignored increasing intelligence of popular media The Sleeper Curve after Woody Allen's Sleeper. The 'curve' reminds me of the 'knee' of hypertext adoption. They're both exponential curves, of course, the knee being one of adoption of new (and more complicated or challenging) media and the Sleeper Curve one of sophistication in existing media.

Johnson cites the web as the great example of hypertext's adoption, and though I want to argue about how hobbled the web is as a hypertextual tool, it is htext and it is widely adopted and it is acclimating popular culture to hypertextual thinking.

The Sleeper Curve of Hypertext

So can we see the Sleeper Curve in hypertext? It's certainly visible in the generally-adopted technology, as we move from the links and static pages of 1994 to today's browsing world with search engines, tabbed browsing, blogs, syndication, archival, and web interfaces for sophisticated databases.

But I want examples of texts. Most of EBIGFY is about comparing the media of several decades ago to what we see today: to Dragnet to Hill Street Blues to The Sopranos. What are examples of hypertexts, even in the watered-down web sense, indicating growing sophistication among readers? And i don't want the elite avant-garde of alternate reality gaming. What smart stuff are the plebes reading?

Everything Bad is Good For You

Most of Everything Bad is Good For You is about the culture surrounding hypertext rather than hypertext itself. Htext is not in the mission statement. That's a shame, because the book is about the challenges that we face in evaluating, adopting, and adapting to new media, and that's very much a hypertext issue.

The basic idea is really worth some thought: We think that popular media (esp. television and movies) are on a 'race to the bottom' culturally. On the contrary, a look at popular culture over time shows increasing sophistication, increased demands on the consumer, and a meritocratic system that rewards sophistication. Content is not the issue, but we're used to looking at that from old media. The cognitive demands of the media are the issue, and they're getting more and more 'educational'.

From Avant-Garde Fringe to Mainstream

On pg. 117 Johnson addresses hypertext specifically:

It seems almost absurd to think of this now, but when the idea of hypertext documents first entered the popular domain in the early nineties, it was a distinctly avant-garde idea, promoted by an experimentalist literary fringe.... Fast forward less than a decade, and something extraordinary occurs: exploring nonlinear document structures becomes as second nature as dialing a phone for hundreds of millions --if not billions-- of people. The mass embrace of hypertext is ... a cultural form that was once exclusively limited to avant-garde sensibilities, now happily enjoyed by grandmothers and third-graders worldwide.

His observation is absolutely true, and I've seen it personally. In June I taught a sample class for fifth-graders at an elite private school, and in a half hour the class had assembled the beginnings of a website through a wiki. I could not have done that even three years ago.

That said, I think he's being a bit glib. Readers of the web are still struggling to navigate nonlinear text, and mostly do so only to get to the bits that are linear enough to be comfortable and understandable. The 'grandmothers and third-graders' I've watched navigate the web are still more comfortable with a newspaper which has links instead of physical page-flipping than with the multilinear and conversational emergent structure of a wiki.

That said, I think even the translated, less-hypertextual media form a sort of ramp up to the more novel structures, and that's the main point of EBIGFY. The new media start out in emulation, but as they move on to innovate, they bring their readers along.

The Curve and the Knee

Johnson calls the ignored increasing intelligence of popular media The Sleeper Curve after Woody Allen's Sleeper. The 'curve' reminds me of the 'knee' of hypertext adoption. They're both exponential curves, of course, the knee being one of adoption of new (and more complicated or challenging) media and the Sleeper Curve one of sophistication in existing media.

Johnson cites the web as the great example of hypertext's adoption, and though I want to argue about how hobbled the web is as a hypertextual tool, it is htext and it is widely adopted and it is acclimating popular culture to hypertextual thinking.

The Sleeper Curve of Hypertext

So can we see the Sleeper Curve in hypertext? It's certainly visible in the generally-adopted technology, as we move from the links and static pages of 1994 to today's browsing world with search engines, tabbed browsing, blogs, syndication, archival, and web interfaces for sophisticated databases.

But I want examples of texts. Most of EBIGFY is about comparing the media of several decades ago to what we see today: to Dragnet to Hill Street Blues to The Sopranos. What are examples of hypertexts, even in the watered-down web sense, indicating growing sophistication among readers? And i don't want the elite avant-garde of alternate reality gaming. What smart stuff are the plebes reading?

Card Shark and Thespis

Mark Bernstein wrote a neat paper that turned my ideas of how to write hypertext inside out. We talk a fair bit about the ways that games are digital narratives, are hypertexts of a sort. Reverse that comparison, then: what if you wrote hypertext like a game? This paper (most accessible as a flash presentation) expands on that idea through the very accessible analogy of a card game with cards as lexia and players as characters.

URL

http://www.markbernstein.org/talks/HT01.html

Thespis

Mark Bernstein brings up the idea of thinking of links backwards-- everything is linked to everything else, and you as an author determine what *prevents* a visit. (Mark wrote a paper and presentation about a card game Thespis to model this.) Then set several players (agents?) who get points for going to certain lexia and provide links... and you've got structure. This goes back to the idea of a link server which revises the link structure for you based on criteria. What rhetorical structures (besides programming) will make the sculpturally, thespis-like approach accessible to authors? A timeline can help you set this up for a static site, but it's still dauntingly complex to make. And people will find the game analogy anaethema, not serious.

Also, the UI is difficult. You need an interface like the path builder, or like Windows Server's "resulting policy" feature which shows you: at this point on this path, what are my constraints and conditions?" Also, "what can't I do?" (Plus: do you show the reader that so that they have a sense of how far they've gotten through the potential of a text?)

There are some big challenges with the Thespis approach. It requires knowledge of the text; it is authorial only. Since it's drawing from a pool of lexia, the text itself must be compelling or the reader starts playing it like a game because the conditions become the focus of reading. If you can see where you're going and where you're not, a game develops around getting places.

In the metaphorical setting of thespis, what about false cards? Cards that a reader should play, but which reconfigure the goals like a game of Fluxx. At this point the people at the table wanted a way to see that possibility, a way to communicate loss ("cards you'll never see are..." or "this link has precluded you from...". Doing that discourages a linear text or linear reading. One interface for this might be a sort of possibility graph-- as you play cards your hand grows, shrinks, and eventually dries up. Parts of a map grow dim as they become inaccessible (or read)

There's a distinction between games and hypertext in the outcome. Having the outcome always the same might be bad game design, but good hypertext. It's a matter of agency and identification with the protagonist. The character in a good text, as in a game, must be limited.

Citation

Bernstein, Mark. "Card Shark and Thespis: Exotic Tools for Hypertext Narrative." Mark Bernstein, Talks. 2001. <http://www.markbernstein.org/talks/HT01.html>.

see also ACM Full Citation

A Rationale for Teaching Hypertext Authoring in Literature Courses

This very short (3 print pages) article presents well one argument for teaching hypertext writing in courses that are not primarily about writing. That is: The process of marking up a hypertext provides the necessary defamiliarization of the text that enables students to look at the markup structures in stead of simply looking through them. Once they are able to see the markup in hypertext, they are more easily able to see the markup in the literature which the course presumably has at its center. The rest of the very accessible article teases out the pieces of that assertion: how writing hypertext defamiliarizes, why that process is necessary, why and how we look through markup in familiar media, and how students can transfer the skills from writing hypertext back to reading and writing other texts.

I love it! It's only one argument, one rationale to which I'd add more --teaching hypertext forces an engagement with structures and scales of thinking that students can gloss with more familiar media-- but it is a rationale, and it's made well and clearly.

Citation

Barndollar, David. A Rationale for Teaching Hypertext Authoring in Literature Courses. University of Texas at Austin: 2003. http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~blogger/whitepapers/archives/000002.html. Also available in PDF form at http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/research/whitepapers/2003/030822-2.pdf

Hypertext is unfamiliar in a good way

In terms of content, the point of literature courses is to familiarize the students with the subjects, arguments, and contexts of the literature; in terms of skill-building, the point of literature courses is to teach students (new) methods of reading that facilitate understanding the literature. This typically means overcoming the students' belief that they know how to read. Using a new medium for their writing (hypertext) helps make clear that new methods for reading are necessary.

This is one case where transparency is a hindrance-- the process of creating hypertexts is sufficiently different from writing papers or essays that the students are forced to consider the way they read and write.

One thing to be careful of when using this technique, it seems to me, is that you re-associate the skills with reading when you're done. You don't want students thinking that the reading skills they are learning apply only to working with your software or with hypertext.

Transferring "markup" back to familiar texts

As McGann points out in Radiant Textuality, texts are always already marked as texts. The markup may be familiar enough in traditional print media to have become transparent, but there are conventions that give a text structure: a page in English begins in the upper left and continues left-to-right; capital letters denote the beginnings of sentences and proper nouns. Having to learn current hypertext formats and their conventions like you would a foreign language (e.g. blank line to separate paragraphs rather than indented first lines) helps break a reader out of the assumptions that make their reading a transparent process.

In a literature course, to teach reading skills, you want to indicate:

• without markup, a text is meaningless
• what counts as markup is dependient on the browser, not the document: readers make distinctions in texts
• difficulty with a text is often a matter of missing some of the markup;
• conversely, understanding markup can illuminate elements in the text that were present but invisible without an understanding of the "tags". This point reminds me of the thesis of the essay Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl. Barndollar notes that learning how to do this correctly is learning how to mark a text in the Elizabethan sense.

There's one sentence that links it all back for me for the t.org project: In fact, teaching hypertext authoring is really just teaching textuality in a practical way.... The hands-on nature of the authoring task provides an encounter with textuality that reading alone cannot.

A Good Practice

Barndollar used a MOO containing the text of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and assigned students to elucidate the references and allusions in the poem and present their work in the MOO. The connection between the hypertext and the poem became an avenue for discussing Eliot's own use of footnotes and references, and about how annotation and allusion work in general.

I want tales of woe

Barndollar says that "not only do instructors face a dearth of scholarship in the discipline, they also face bewilderment, if not outright resistance, in their institutions." This makes intuitive sense to me, but I'd love to have some anecdotal examples or case studies. I need to talk to more teachers who have taught hypertext authoring in their classes.

I do wonder whether this paper is of interest to people who are not already considering hypertext. As the title states, it's more of a rationale than an argument, more useful for defending a desired task than convincing others to use the technique.

Unfiction.com: Alternate Reality Gaming

Unfiction.com isn't terribly interesting in itself as a site, but reading it I can feel the earth crumbling under my feet as I slide toward The Rabbit Hole. The site is a portal for Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) and that seems interesting as hypertext. Besides being, you know, all about fascinating and absorbing games.

There's a good bit of thought about games as hypertexts, and some about online communities and their archives as hypertexts (yes?), and discussion of the difference between digital narratives and "true" or literary hypertext. I'm fascinated by ARGs because they seem to sit in between.

hypertextuality of ARGs

ARGs themselves are digital narratives in the strictest sense, though linked texts are integral to some of them. More integral to the ARG phenomenon, though, are the communities that spring up around them. Those communities treat the games as hypertexts by picking them apart by looking at the games and their constituent puzzles multi-dimensionally, wandering through websites in cycles and following new paths as they open. The communities are also collaborating online and forming their own databases and working htexts for the purpose of solving the puzzles. When the games finish, someone in the community often creates a linear projection or slice of the whole thing, both game and solution effort, to make a "guide" that tells the story of the game experience. Sometimes there's another projection made for people who don't want spoilers.

Though ARGs might slide off of Douglas' strictest definition of hypertext, in a more practical sense they require and result in all of the behaviors I consider to be the pedagogic triumphs of hypertext: they :

• demand multidimensional consideration of data
• encourage "turning corners" in your thinking
• force awareness of the multilinearity of communities and conversations
• coach readers in the understanding and formation of linear narratives as 'projections' of multilinear experience
• explicitly demand cyclical reading and linking between narratives both personal and external

So perhaps ARGs are behaviorally hypertextual?

Related Items

Some of these I have to put in the hopper for later; others I can probably get away with just linking here:

URL

http://www.unfiction.com

Memex and Beyond Web Site

The Memex and Beyond Web Site seems to be closed but valuable. It's a snapshot, circa 1996, of the key people, institutions, papers, and conferences in the field of (academic?) hypertext at that point. It's very much what this site would aspire to be-- a thorough index of the field. Based on what's there and the stated goals, it would be lovely to see it finished, but its structure is well-done even by current standards, an internet geologic age after it went quiet.

It's interesting because it shows very vividly what I call projections of a hypertext. Every page of the site is a multidimensional structure flattened into linear form, and each item on the page is a vertex, a link which allows you to see that same item in another projection. Each link serves to highlight the multidimensional structure of the text by serving as the corner between facets, the juncture of flattened images. The way you navigate the site keeps the structure in mind.

I have to post about it now as I keep finding myself coming back to it, sometimes for material and sometimes to consider its form. As I dig through the site I find myself frustrated by the web, wishing that the links would yield two or three destinations each: that item in each of the other planes of the site and as an item by itself.

Aha! Hypertext Systems

Finally, I found a good quick reference page for a bunch of the early hypertext systems. Eventually I hope that my own "Tools" index will cover those systems and more.

The Five-Paragraph Essay

In the process of writing that last entry, I found a site that exemplifies several principles of good hypertext. Marla's site on the Structure of the Five Paragraph Essay takes a fairly simple topic and shows it from a variety of angles. With the same text as examples, you can see an outline of the essay, the marked up full text of the essay, or detailed explanations of each element of the essay. This multifaceted, prismatic view of a text, where the reader can switch between the raw text or a structural view, with multiple depths of engagement in the form of linked definitions and contextual expansions, is exactly what hypertext can and should do.

Citation

DeSoto, Marla. "Structure of the Five-Paragraph Essay." 2001. Glendale Community College. 31 Jan. 2002 <http://www.gc.maricopa.edu/English/essay/>

The Great Lettuce Head on Hypertext

Steve Ersinghaus' Great Lettuce Head touches (as advertised) on: fiction, English Literature, New Media, Writing, and technology in education. And it has a hypertext category.

URLGREYHOT on Information work and Education

Michael Angeles confusingly lists URLGREYHOT's categories as separate blogs. Regardless, the content is interesting and the topics closest to the heart of t.org are the information work blog, Education, and the Education blog. Even if he is into homeschooling.

It looks like "Education" is separate from the "Education Blog" in that, like t.org, the site contains things which are outside the blog and exist in a broader hypertext.

Something Different on Tinderbox and Blogging

Doug Miller doesn't have a hypertext category in his blog per se, but his Tinderbox, blogging, and education categories are all relevant to t.org's interests.

Kottke on Web technology

Kottke.org doesn't have a category on hypertext exactly, but does have a section on web technology, and that seems to be where the hypertext issues that I'm interested in fall. I need to write about "hypertext" vs. "the web" since that's such an FAQ whenever I mention the term.

NoCategories on Hypertext

Dylan Kinnet's NoCategories' largest or second largest ... category ... is on hypertext.

surftrail

surftrail is Anders Fagerjord's personal blog, and it made a bit of a splash among weblogs in August of 2003 when Anders made each blog entry its own webpage rather than taking the standard approach of collecting many entries onto a single web page.

Most blogs allow the reader to read an entry only in the context (a page) of other entries, whether the context is a chronological archive, a category or subject grouping, or a search result.

When each entry (or thought/topic in an entry) has its own page, several things can happen:

• style is more flexible - each entry can more easily have its own visual tone through framing and typography
• more hypertext structures become possible - forks and cycles among your entries become more apparent
• overlapping structures don't collide - so the chronological nature of a blog can more easily coexist with categories, idea hubs, and non-categorical trails
• if you buy into the "golden age of hypertext" rhetoric, you get to write 'more like the hypertext novelists'. and if you don't buy into the nostalgia, you still get to take advantage of the features which made the novelists choose the medium in the first place.

This is different enough that folks have started to call such blogs Fagerjordian.

Finally, a page per topic

These things appeal to me, and were part of my thinking when I started textuality.org. I hadn't really finished the implementation, though. Each post got its own page as well as appearing on various indices, but each of the topics within a post didn't have their own pages. That made linking to a topic within a post difficult-- first because the reader would be constantly jumping between otherwise-unrelated posts and trying to find what I'd linked to on the page, and secondly because Tinderbox had a hard time exporting that feature because it couldn't tell whether the endpoint of a link was a page (blah.html) or an anchor (blah.html#ablah)

So last night I finished the implementation and gave topics (Anders calls them sidebars) a template that not only makes them readable but which makes explicit where the reader has ended up. There are links to neighboring topic-pages so that the reader can continue on at the topic level, and there's a link to the post (parent) that originally created the topic. Oh! And there's a perrmalink to the topic as it appears in the post, which is where I'd rather a linker send a new reader. It means that every single character in the posts appears twice in the html --once on the topic-page and once in the entry-page-- but 'disk is cheap', and that's a small price to pay for all this freedom...

I didn't do it quite the way that Anders did. I considered it, but it's a bit limiting. Besides being a blog, t.org is intended to become a directory of readings of 'nouns' in the field of hypertext-- articles, hypertexts, people, events, etc. I don't want to limit myself to having post = noun; I want a post to potentially contain 'nouns' (some already do), or to not be a noun at all.

EdTechPost

EdTechPost is not a pretty site, but neither is what he writes about: life in the trenches of educational technology, which he helpfully narrows down to "tools for learning, thinking, and collaborating". Scott Leslie knows his stuff, writes about it well, and links extensively. He's not just looking at media delivery, nor just at glorified word processors (though that could be interesting too), he examines the nitty-gritty details of how these tools work in educational settings while (seemingly) using the blog to step back and get some perspective on his daily work from the broad view of where the field is. It's a good example of why blogging is good for your career.

when educational technology is hypertext

The site is here on t.org for one clear reason. First, I think that he's on the technical, practical fringe of this site's interest in hypertext. EdTechPost focuses on course management systems, 'learning objects' and the challenges of 'learning object repositories'. As it does so, it examines the practical challenges of integrating hypermedia into daily life. Teaching English is more than delivering good books and handouts to students-- it's facilitating discussion, interpreting students' novice articulations of the material and connecting thoughts, and keeping the class focused among a hundred other things; so using hypermedia is more than just delivering rich media to the students, it has to facilitate work with the media, allow novice navigation and explorations, and get the technology out of the way. These are very much hypertextual challenges.

Technology and the Harkness Table

I spent today in a conference at the lovely Rocky Hill School in East Greenwich, RI which was quite interesting in ways which, sadly, have very little to do with my job.

The conference was aptly named "Technology and the Harkness Table" because it was exactly that. We got to see a building that was literally designed around technology and the Harkness Table mode of teaching and saw how wonderful it is when engaged teachers, supportive administration, sensible architecture, and funding all come together. In most schools you might get two of those in any one place at any one time, especially if you're in the public schools. An independent school might get you three. In either setting it's rare to have all of those, and Rocky Hill was doing some impressive things with that setup.

WebQuest

Belinda Snyman presented on a "WebQuest" that she ran with her English class. It was adapted from "BardQuest" by Derek Furr, and involved breaking the class into groups with roles for each student in the group; each group researched an assigned topic related to Shakespeare and his cultural context. The groups presented their work as a web page or PowerPoint presentation.

The technology certainly helped the project-- students assigned the role of "skeptic" questioned each group's sources, pushing the groups to examine websites, (and articles and books) for validity. The ease of digital collaboration lowered the bar for students working at different speeds. The ease with which students could record and share each others' presentations meant that the whole class had a better chance of benefitting from each group's different work.

Forum Discussions

Alda Farlow and Dathalinn O'Dea led a session springing from Blackboard-based forum discussion and into a Harkness Table discussion. The subtleties of Harness Table teaching were the focus, but you and I are both here for hypertext and maybe educational technology, so on with that.

The use of the forum was a bit more than an augmentation of the "read and come to class with questions about what you read." The online forum is asynchronous and public, which means that the discussion could get going well before the class met, which made for a richer discussion. Also, everyone's posts are timestamped, which is a handy nuance. If they want, teachers can spot students who aren't participating, or always doing last-minute work, or even get a hint that they're working together (not a bad thing).

A sidenote of this presentation was the set of student-generated notes about the Harkness model. The reflections say a lot about the students' sense of agency in their own education, and I wonder whether their cool technology helped empower them, or whether it's the Harkness model, or whether it's just their really good teachers and school.

Two Functions for Technology in the Classroom

One thing that struck me today was that there seem to be two very distinct ways that you can use technology in the classroom. Put simply: you can improve your teaching of the skills you currently teach (without the tech), or you can teach new things, skills that can only practically be taught by using the technology. But that's oversimplification. That statement is worth unpacking.

You can improve your teaching of the skills you currently teach...

One of the really cool things I saw today was a tablet PC used with a projector to allow the teacher to stay at the table while still 'writing on the board'. The unobtrusive tablet PC, no bigger than a textbook, sat on the table with 'journal' software pulled up, and as the class talked the teacher was jotting notes, or highlighting things in the text the class was discussing, or pulling up posts on a class forum. The whole time the teacher remained at the table-- no turned back, no throne at the head of the room, no darkened room and noisy overhead. Students with laptops, too, could be given control of the projector to share their work. At the end of the class, a student saves their notes and posts them to a server. Weeks can pass without paper being passed if the teacher planned for it.

That's pretty cool. Students' different modes of learning are more easily accommodated. Students too shy to speak up in class find their voice once it's easy to share online. More real work happens more quickly when the drudgery of xeroxing and sorting and carrying folders and handing things out and transcribing is taken away.

But that's still just an improvement of what teachers and students are already doing. The tablet-and-projector is a glorified overhead projector. The forum is an email list, or a set of summarized and handed-in responses. The posted notes. It's so much more efficient that it lets new and wonderful things happen, but fundamentally the technology is just facilitating what we already do.

...or you can teach new things, skills that can only practically be taught by using the technology.

If you have students building a hypertext together, be it through wiki or Tinderbox or Blackboard or FrontPage, you are likely developing skills which cannot practically be taught without the technology. Students will practice line-by-line comparisons of texts, they'll examine and manipulate the structure of texts, they'll cite their work and link it directly back to source material in its original context in ways that can't be done without so much work as to make them all but impossible without the technology. They might as well be new skills.

As awesome as it was, and it was, everything that I saw today was 'just' an improvement on what's already being done. I think that good teaching with hypertext and digital text can do things that we really can't do otherwise.

In Conclusion, No Conclusion

In the end, very little of the day was applicable to my current professional work. As a summer program that moves into host campuses for seven weeks, we don't get to set up a building, or train the teachers to use tablets or Blackboard. Nor, for that matter, can we train the students in the short time we have with them. Many of our classes teach with something like the Harkness Table model, but resources and the nature of the program keep technology largely out of that side of it. Like many schools, we can't swing the pervasive computing environment that Rocky Hill has managed.

I think that technology in our classroom will remain on a class-by-class basis for now. I do wonder whether we couldn't use wikis to help in curriculum development, but that's another topic entirely.

Tinderbox Weekend Boston

Tinderbox Weekend Boston was a two day gathering for people new to the Tinderbox software and for experienced users looking for new perspectives on the software. I think it succeeded for both groups, from what I heard over the weekend and after.

It was an impressive event in its subtleties. It was a friendly, intimate conference (a tricky thing to manage) of people from divergent professions and with divergent interests and experience. The sessions were quick, accessible, and friendly; as with any good conference, in between were breaks and meals full of banter, advice, and questions... though because Tinderbox is used in so many ways, the conversations here seemed to wander further afield to accomodate personal issues from different walks of life. At the end, we left with a weekend's worth of things to think about and a CD full of files to dissect-- real life examples and works from the presenters and attendees.

The weekend seemed a bit overwhelming to those who were completely new to the software and looking for a tutorial-- you'd get a lot more out of the weekend if you'd played with the software at least a little. For those who had, the weekend was a wealth of stories, examples, and discussions about how to use the remarkable software package.

The Sessions

The weekend was organized around a series of talks by experienced users. Elin Sjursen, Tekka Editor, spoke about the basics of Tinderbox --and showed those of us who 'know the basics' about some neat features we hadn't found. I learned about automatic spell checking, about some quick keys and clicks for navigation, and about how Tinderbox takes drag-and-dropped text from other applications and sets up notes for you.

Alwin Hawkins spoke next about weblogs in the health care community. He discussed the social and political side of Tinderbox, examined self-publication as well as about using Tinderbox to organize your own medical information for yourself or for others. This hit a nuance of the software that's hard to explain-- how it both helps you record and organize your own information and then helps you share parts or all of that information with others. It was a powerful example of that process.

Mark Bernstein then walked us through exporting, one of the trickier sides of Tinderbox. Tinderbox doesn't make many sacrifices in flexibility in order to become easy for any single limited use, so the powerful export system has a learning curve. Mark's talk walked us in 90 minutes from exporting a single note using a two-word template through exporting that same information as a complex website using CSS and graphics.

Doug Miller gave us two mind-opening sessions about "living in Tinderbox". It was a fascinating look at about fifteen ways that Tinderbox can be used in very different ways-- from outlining to managing a real estate career. These sessions were a microcosm of the whole weekend in that every time I spoke to someone I learned about a new way that Tinderbox is being used.

The weekend closed out with a session by Barry Webster about making and sharing a web calendar with his students and a look at new and upcoming development on Tinderbox itself by Mark.

The Excercises

There were also two useful excercises that helped us use and share the knowledge we picked up about Tinderbox.

For the first we were given a sizable Tinderbox file with almost no hierarchy and no differentiation between notes, and each of the three groups had to impose some order on the mess. I loved it, because this is something most other software can't do very well: Tinderbox helps you take what you think you know (or what you don't) and look at it in a bunch of new ways. You can take what you know and turn it on its ear.

Our group took a bit of a forensic approach to the whole thing: we used agents to help us make some hierarchies without disturbing what we were given; we looked at it chronologically and reconstructed some of how the author must have built it from readings they'd done; we looked at edit times and found that there wasn't anything to go on; and we saved all of those examinations to present to the group.

The second exercise was a bit more hurried, as it tried to address exporting: take another file and make some basic exports. Still it was impressive and amusing to see everyone's approaches, up to Jeffrey's pumpkin-based "Pepys Watch".

Links

This post is a sort of sequel to Maureen Baehr's Tinderbox Conference Report from Tinderbox Weekend San Francisco. More Tinderbox Weekends are in the works, and you should check the Eastgate site if this sounds interesting.

Some others have written up the weekend: Doug Miller posted an entry, Mark Bernstein took some notes, Alwin posted several entries for the weekend, and Jeffrey Radcliffe posted and then put the weekend into practice with improvements to his blog.

eNarrative 4

I took a fair number of notes at eNarrative 4, in March of 2002. Some of them are still readable and potentially interesting, and I've put them below.

The eNarrative roundtables were neat events; Eastgate did a good job of rounding up leading lights for the topics at hand, the venue was pleasant, and the roundtable format left the agenda flexible enough for that many smart and interested people to all participate as they wished.

This was my second eNarrative conference, and was much closer to my interests (education) than the first. Since it was also one of my last acts of participation in the community before this site, many of my notes are still central interests in this site's exploration of hypertext. I imagine that several of the subtopics of this entry will wind up recycled into other entries that follow.

Notes, such as they are, follow. I've done my best to make them read sensibly, but have not put much work into making it flow seamlessly. These are notes.

Have we read yet?

It's an easy and common misconception that reading means visiting each and every node once and only once. Six or seven weeks into a course, students will realize they won't get to or have to read everything, and then they're okay. (This happened to me in college with my regular reading for my English major, but I'm not sure that the sort of physically overwhelming amount of reading is a common experience before grad school for everyone, so I'm not sure whether I can generalize that analogy.) Still, though ...

.... "Are we reading yet?" - how do students know they've done the assignment in a non-linear text that doesn't necessarily chart their completion like page-counts do? The structure in hypertexts are often too obscure. There isn't an easily accessible history. And students don't have any experience what it's supposed to be like. A counter-argument is: don't underrate existing "hypertext"... games, websites, etc. Students know when they've gotten through those.

Information retrieval as hypertext-- Is searching on google equivalent to reading Patchwork Girl? It's a different model of authorship, of literacy. Or is that difference simply a matter of mapping and of history? Wth CubicEye you clearly build a text out of a web search. The spatial model is hard to get for some people.

Resistance to Hypertext

Is resistance to hypertext (on whose part?) intrinsic or habitual?

Why the vehement resentment to hypertext in general? A reluctance to give up existing competency and literacy for a new medium. Wanting a definitive experience, a closure even if it's misleading or false. Readers construct a schema as they read, their own mental map, and hypertext is disorienting 99% of the time. "[In most hypertexts] you don't have a schema for predicting what's next, for predicting where that text is going to go. We predict all the time." There's also an age aspect to this-- older writers are more invested in existing schema for reading.

Okay, but what about in social discourse, where you also can't predict the direction? Is hypertext better at representing social discourse and representing thought across discursive boundaries (i.e. multiple people's viewpoints)? Even in those cases, organization is still perceived as seriousness... and you can't fully get hypertext by maping it onto schema that you already know (ETA: it's like using tinderbox as just an outliner, or just a mapper). People resent you as an author taking their transparency away, and they don't know what's at the other end of the learning curve. There's also resentment from authors who feel that their artistry has been superseded or overshadowed by concerns or artistry of technology or of user interface. Who wants to worry about User Interface? It's ironic that "complex" pages end up getting perceived as "for kids".

Hypertext for Teachers

David asks: why make hypertext optional? Answer: because the learning curve is too steep for time to teach the tools with the whole class. Because their habit is to add things on, not build - to create threads, not cross-linking or webs.

The scariness of the idea that the grade is dependent on reading everything affects the professor, too-- must the professor fight hypertext itself to read everything?

It's also scary for professors to make the transition to reading and grading hypertexts because it's not so clear where and how to 'comment in the margins'. (my own professor, who was comfortable with Storyspace and assigning hypertexts, still made me in one class hand out a linear version of a paper to my fellow students and that is what he graded and commented on.)

How do you explain to a class the utility of complex structure when other classes and the educational system privilege short stuff and argumentation along the five-paragraph model (intro, support, support, support, conclusion)

How do you grade a hypertext, especially if it involves programming code? It's probably better not to comment in the code, but to make a separate report on the code. You must be careful to communicate the criteria. You can have other students make comments with pointers (something that is especially easy in Tinderbox, since you can cluster comments in their own space, group them visually with adornments, but have them linking to anywhere in the main text. There's also no reason not to have comments accumulate, and it's easy to pull comments into a selection of "comments worth sharing" in class discussion or with later classes.

One aspect of student anxiety about hypertext is a matter of escaping the One True Reading model. This anxiety is fed by the game analogy-- repetition is often equal to failure in games unless there's evident proof of advancement. Another stone on a pedestal (thinking of Dark Castle, here), etc. In most hypertexts there's precious little evidence for a student's advancement outside of a reader's self-assessment... and we're teaching them how to be readers in the first place. Too few hypertexts make explicit that a circular structure in the reading is in fact a spiral.

An excercise for a class: "is this website hypertextual?"

"Who's Cribbing" by Jack Lewis - just tryto map it. ... trying to pushes students out of the comfort zone and gets them to see some of the difference between complex linear text and "native" hypertext.

Writers (among the students?) like "WOE", "Is me past" (?). No luck with "Afternoon". They also like "The Unknown".

You can create a hypertext physically with notecards, yarn, and colored paper. Using a physical example gets the metaphors, the paradigm, down and then you can bring it back to the writing: writing is a process of taking all those ideas, making each grammatical, and putting transitions (links) between them. This gets the visual learners. You can see them get it when they link words, rather than boxes (lexia).

We need forii (forums?) for pedagogical practice in hypertext that doesn't reduce to academic papers. That includes actual practice and discussion between practicioners as well as advice for those who might be willing to incorporate hypertext but unable to crest the learning curve.

Anne's History Course

Anne taught a course that used hypertext to examine the stories of a "silent generation" in Japan. Her class used hypertext to break through a cultural avoidance of WWII stories by having students interview their grandparents and relatives for their personal stories to create a hypertext from them. One student interviewed her grandmother, who was reluctant at first, then opened up and shared photos, talked... and talked and talked. She had never in her life had her story asked of her.

even with a web page, people think of each piece as linked linear bits, rather than a network made linear

Why was this project different as a hypertext than as a "conventional" text?

• The multimedia forced multiple voices. (Multimedia vs. hypertext was an issue in our discussion. "What is hypertext?" It's an irritating question but one for which we must have several, contextual, lucid answers.)

• Learning new tools and structure forced new kinds of questions.

• Creating the product as hypertext freed the student not only in structure but in content-- she could create contrasting voices.

The project led to empowerment and voicing so powerful that it could not be overstated. People break out of abusive relationships, discover family stories, discover multiplicity when faced with the inherent multivalence of hypertext. The students' responses to American responses to the WTC attacks.

Students struggled with the difference between a public act (for the web) and a personal one (for the professor) given the personal nature of the assignment. There was tension between commitment and participation in something larger. The public nature of the project, however, also gave the project an authenticity-- the students were involved in a real way in Japan's current discussions over its history in WWII, in building archives of memories. Their engagement in the assignment and the tasks behind it was immediate and (helped by the distance from known rhetorical structures) not defined by ideological authority structures. It was hypertext and it was on the web.

Would it be "selling out" a hypertext to give a "standard" version of a hypertext?

Tinderbox at eNarrative

Mark introduced Tinderbox, since it was a fairly new product when the conference happened. Some quick notes from that presentation:

• Tinderbox split functionality off from Storyspace.

• Anders Fagerjord's site uses tinderbox, and he has tips sometimes. Markbernstein.org is a tinderbox blog.

• "The Victorian Web is like a blog of a community." NO - it's edited, 'posts' are approved by a secondary authority. YES - blogs get edited. NO - secondary editing party. YES - blog clusters get unlinked and ignored out of existence.

• In a war, hypertext would be lost. The community would be lost. They're all overexcited geeks.

• Agents can get distant blogs

Is a Tinderbox-built page a hypertext? No, there's no hiding and revealing. Yes, if you make links pop-ups? No - it's a rendered collage, hypertextual but not a hypertext. No, because you can't backtrack. Well, it's a hypertext with a non-hypertext projection, then.

Where Storyspace was about dynamic links and presentation, Tinderbox is more of an organizational tool. It's about notes, indexing, organization, agents. Eventually it would be nice if they were interoperable, so that you could drag things back and forth.

Storyspace has been around since 1987/1991 (what are those dates?) ... and has therefore spent more than a decade as a chunk of code. That's pretty rare. Victory Garden and Afternoon are still there after a decade. Things that were unusual about Storyspace then:

• links.

• Can find the spaces in another file despite being renamed, moved, a different version.

• Links were stored within the file.

• A text space = a window.

It was a tool for reading and writing large hypertexts, especially focused around narrative. There are features that are still unusual in 2002:

• Guard fields to qualify the destination of links

• external links are stored internally

• you can have overlapping link sources

• you can make anchors appear and disappear

• two-handed reading (for showing links, at least).

Sarah: Hypertext for Linear Writers

Sarah (?) then discussed how she's used Storyspace and seen Storyspace used with tree-killing writers. Writing is a non-linear process, and Storyspace tools let a writer work in a virtual multi-dimensional space. You can create assets and then draw upon them-- creating spaces then creating paths through them (multiple paths, even) which then become the narrative flow. You can create aliases which you can then organize in various ways. You could place the spaces' aliases in a two-dimensional chart with characters along the y-axis and the flow of the story (or chapters) along the x-axis to show when characters come and go. You could lay the spaces out along the narrative flow in the x-axis and place them on the y-axis according to the tension to plot that in your novel. Or you could have your proofreaders do the same to show you their perspective. This is a process of organizing and filtering your assets, of bringing the words from data (about characters, places) to story. Plus, you might note that it's easier to get (and see) nonlinearity from this approach.

It would be really useful to watch authors working, especially together. In this roundtable we're working with abstractions, but seeing people work, try to make meaning out of interfaces, see how people share ideas when working physically together... that would really help us see how to make the tools facilitate what they do. How to build Tinderbox into a personal knowledge manager, beyond being just an information manager. At the same time, you need to be aware of and careful with your niche-- misspent expectations killed Agenda. Be careful about what is under your control vs. automatic, etc.

A Hypertext Reading Group

What would a hypertext reading group look like? A house party? A workshop, like a writer's workshop (and what would that look like)? A correspondence course might be a sensible approach, given the relative paucity of hypertext scholars and geographic dispersion. This would be a great way for writers to perform usability testing on their hypertexts. Would you want to follow the "cabin in Maine" or the "weekend house party" model? One participant related having a workshop where each participant brought one work, sent it around a few weeks before, and then discussed them for two days.

Issues for any sort of group would be: ways to share commentary (including links or visual arrangements), ways to work independently yet together simultaneously. Could you build a tool that would help share hypertexts? (Some Tinderbox files are small enough to share over instant messaging, but not all, and there's no way to actively serve a tinderbox file so that multiple people can see and edit it simultaneously on different computers.)

Confusion and Hidden Literacy

DAlso, don't forget that there is fun in not knowing, in serendipity and re-vision. When is confusion, misdirection, not knowing fun and when is it frustrating? Is the author or reader at fault for the frustration with Finnegan's Wake? Why do some of these texts gain a cult following or critical respect, but not others? It's not just complexity or simplicity-- why do people go for 12-tone music or atonality for that matter, but not for hypertext?

Rob (?) points out that there are visible vs. invisible literacies. Sarah adds that it's also about text vs. language-- people have less trouble with graphic (multimedia) hypertext than with blocks of text. Ann wonders whether it's just the level to which the reader can cop out of having to figure it out. When is it a matter of "fixing" the interface, and when do you want not to? A diagram (say, architectural) still contains some intentional and unintentional ambiguity.

We then looked at argument. There's some use in understanding and displaying intermediate structures, the way we're thinking in the midst of an argument, before we've completed a design. A final product inevitably has had questions decided or choices made that we may want to reconsider or present as questions. There's the idea of a second choice, which might be better for another context. We can represent that ambiguity in hypertext by hiding alternatives, or revealing them. There's no reason not to put other viewpoints in.

Aren't there issues with presenting meta or side conversations in a publshed hypertext, though? Is there a way to present it that's not ironic?

UVA has a new imprint for electronic scholarship in the humanities.

Links can contain a lot of information. It's a challenge for any given interface or presentation to incorporate that liminal data into the narrative flow. You could use tooltips for mouseovers. In a linear presentation you could put link text between the contents of the lexia. What you want to do (often) is telegraph that you'll be sending someone (through a link) somewhere else... especially if it's outside your text. And in this context, it's worth thinking about what outside means. By linking resources you bring them into your own text to some extent... but don't have editorial control over them.

Then we thought about intermediate levels of "telegraphy". You don't always want to give perfect information about where a link goes because you risk the reader assuming they understand or not being interested: and they won't follow your link. Yet you don't want to leave a reader stumped as to where to go or wandering aimlessly (unless that's your goal) because then they're lost. One neat idea is to create indeterminate links or links that can be hidden or revealed according to some level of exploration that the reader is willing to undertake. They could set their willingness to stray from a topic, or stay within an area. I brought up the hypertext in which I colored links according to link type (definition or explanation).

Do you need guardfields or programmingto enforce argument, structure, or complexity?

Understanding narrative shape is even more critical to new readers.

How about random entry into a hypertext-- when someone drops into your website, how do they get context, a sense of where they are, and whether their interest in the page they're on translates to an interest in the rest of your site? Short of framing (sidebars, logos and explanatory text), you could present a pop-up window if the referrer doesn't match your own site, you can have textual breadcrumbs, and you could present a tiny icon of a map which is linked to a larger map.

How do you represent where the reader is in the larger argument (which may or may not map onto the site map?

Don't forget that when it comes to hypertext, most readers are "children"... they need to know strategies.

Thespis

Mark Bernstein brings up the idea of thinking of links backwards-- everything is linked to everything else, and you as an author determine what *prevents* a visit. (Mark wrote a paper and presentation about a card game Thespis to model this.) Then set several players (agents?) who get points for going to certain lexia and provide links... and you've got structure. This goes back to the idea of a link server which revises the link structure for you based on criteria. What rhetorical structures (besides programming) will make the sculpturally, thespis-like approach accessible to authors? A timeline can help you set this up for a static site, but it's still dauntingly complex to make. And people will find the game analogy anaethema, not serious.

Also, the UI is difficult. You need an interface like the path builder, or like Windows Server's "resulting policy" feature which shows you: at this point on this path, what are my constraints and conditions?" Also, "what can't I do?" (Plus: do you show the reader that so that they have a sense of how far they've gotten through the potential of a text?)

There are some big challenges with the Thespis approach. It requires knowledge of the text; it is authorial only. Since it's drawing from a pool of lexia, the text itself must be compelling or the reader starts playing it like a game because the conditions become the focus of reading. If you can see where you're going and where you're not, a game develops around getting places.

In the metaphorical setting of thespis, what about false cards? Cards that a reader should play, but which reconfigure the goals like a game of Fluxx. At this point the people at the table wanted a way to see that possibility, a way to communicate loss ("cards you'll never see are..." or "this link has precluded you from...". Doing that discourages a linear text or linear reading. One interface for this might be a sort of possibility graph-- as you play cards your hand grows, shrinks, and eventually dries up. Parts of a map grow dim as they become inaccessible (or read)

There's a distinction between games and hypertext in the outcome. Having the outcome always the same might be bad game design, but good hypertext. It's a matter of agency and identification with the protagonist. The character in a good text, as in a game, must be limited.

Transitions

Integrating transitions into a text where the order of the lexia is flexible is an enormous challenge. You need to either create nodes/lexia that are transitions or find ways to integrate transitions into the nodes. It would be wonderful to find a way to avoid separating the text into nodes in the first place, and to avoid making the transitions static within the nodes.

Diane's Highlights from eNarrative

--------------Diane's highlights------------------

It's important to impress upon new readers the ida of relearning... to show them that it's a new and different way of reading and writing.

It would be neat to have a whole hypertext course, rather than just having a "unit" on hypertext in another course... you should use a hypertext as the course workspace, archive it, document it.

Emphasizing the game aspect of hypertext could be a way to get it to students, though it then faces the tension between ease and comfort of use vs. the seriousness

THere aren't enough models for what it means to read or write hypertext successfully. Some people seem to know it, but have a hard time articulating it.

We need a catalog of ways to show that life itself is hypertextual even outside of hypertext.

Links are a disappearing work-- how do we see links as a text themselves, how do we evaluate that text?

Mapping plot practices to hypertext and viceversa is wonderful, usefully interchangeable. Thinking of a book as a view onto a hypertext is a neat metaphor. (I feel that Proust's Rememberance of Things Past would be a particularly easy text to think of this way.) Tinderbox is good as a tool for creating multiple projections of a text.

eNarrative 2

Whee, zip, wow. A Keanu Reeves-like "whoah." Those were my first reactions to the eNarrative2 conference that happened Feb. 24-25, 2001. A year later, when I wrote up these notes for my own site, that was still true. The eNarrative roundtables kept on top of the field and did their small part to lead it as well. I use the past tense because the last of the eNarratives happened in 2003, and I know of no plans to bring them back.

During the roundtable I volunteered to collect and record the URLs discussed during the roundtables, and that was the majority of my notes. One of the most amazing things about the conference was the sheer brilliance of the readings; I walked through the site and gathered the URLs from there as well. My condensation doesn't have any of the cool discussion that the eNarrative site does, but it has nearly all the external site links.

The extensive notes on the content of eNarrative4 are, to me, much more interesting.

Links discussed at eNarrative2

The publicly available URLs that we discussed at the conference are below; we also discussed a fair number of in-progress or non-public URLs, and I held on to those: if you were at the conference and want the URLs, drop me a line. I've tried to put eNarrative2 participants' names by their pieces; apologies if I've missed putting your name next to your work.

URLs that are live as of Oct. 4 2004 are linked; discussed URLs that are broken are unlinked.

• http://www.gmunk.com - "8th of July"
• http://www.crankbunny.com - Norma Taraya (the current site features a new project)
• http://www.scottmccloud.com
• http://www.unknownhypertext.com
• http://www.rhizome.org
• http://www.genarts.com/karl/
• http://www.biota.org
• http://www.paregos.com
• http://www.pixeltoon.com - Howard Kamentsky
• http://www.halfempty.com
• http://www.presstube.com
• http://www.6amhoover.com - Donna Leishman (hey, this made it into the New York Times! Great job, Donna!)
• http://www.onlinecaroline.com
• http://www.dreamless.org - follow "web" link, scroll to 2000 section; no archive available.
• http://www.praystation.com - version 1, version 2, version 3 (discussed), version 4
• http://www.moments.org
• http://www.poemsthatgo.com - including a piece we discussed and which I think is an excellent example of an interface to orient the reader without making the piece boring.
• http://www.zeldman.com
• http://www.globz.com
• http://www.slackbastard.net/~polaris/AYB2.swf - "All Your Base Belong to Us"
• http://www.victorianweb.org/history/histov.html
• http://www.comedycentral.com/spotlight/kml/flash_strind1.shtml - Strindberg and Helium
• http://www.bullseyeart.com - seems to have changed
• http://www.rayoflight.net - alas, I loved this and it is gone.
• (The secret life of letters)
• http://www.hyperstudio.com

Silke Baumblüth sent a few German URLs that attend to related subjects. She wrote:

The first one is the NULL-Project with small Hypertexts combined to a chart that looks like a star-chart. Obviously the sites are mainly in German but maybe it can still be interesting to take a look.

• http://www.dumontverlag.de/null/
• http://www.dichtung-digital.com
• http://www.hyperfiction.de/
• http://auer.netzliteratur.net/
• http://www.stuttgart.de/stadtbuecherei/index.html

Links from the eNarrative2 site

This is a condensation of the links within Eastgate System's eNarrative Conference website as of eNarrative2. The site is fascinating (the roundtables were fascinating), but as I sought to build a set of links to the really awesome online hypertext, I wanted a condensed index. Textuality.org has become that condensed index, and I really ought to go through and change many of these links to be internal (or functional). However, as an artifact of the time when I made it, of a prototype of this site pre-Tinderbox, this suffices-- and it encourages me to move on to more productive tasks than reworking my old links lists.

In the outline below,

• The top layer are my categories: narrative sites, and communities, and tech sites.

  • The next layer is generally the eNarrative page where the links are discussed. Visit these.
    • Any other layers are categorical
      

      The boxes contain the offsite links.

---

• Narrative sites
  • Donna Leishman's
    

    6amhoover Little Red Ridinghood blackeyed.com Requiem For A Dream

    VectorPark Map50 Boogie Lights Azartmedia's Flash Lab

  • eN2 readings
    

    Walking Together What Remains this is why I fell in love with Storyspace Adrian Miles Vog: Nosepilot Flight404 Homard Kamentsky Pixeltoon Lite Show Strindberg & Helium Skip Intro

    Half Empty James Patterson Once Upon A Forest Joshua Davis help Dane comfyluxe Dane Moholy-Nagy 360degrees The Dream Life of Letters Brian Kim Stefans Captain Lo-Rez Matthew Burns

  • eN1 readings
    • HYPERTEXT
      

      Hypertext 2.0 George P. Landow David Kolb, Socrates in the Labyrinth : Hypertext, Argument, Philosophy. For a more concise view, see his Hypertext '97 paper, " Scholarly Hypertext: Self-Represented Complexity"

      Mark Bernstein " Hypertext Gardens " Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden . The Unknown Resources: The Hypertext Kitchen Resources: The Electronic Literature Organization

    • NARRATIVE
      

      The Database as a Symbolic Form London Eye Scott McCloud.com ICST - Scott McCloud's monthly column

      VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin's Web Photo Journals Bricklin's own journal Derek Powazek's { Fray} Bubbe's Back Porch Abbe Don Digital Storytelling Festival

    • DYNAMIC TYPOGRAPHY
      

      Help Poems That Go The Murmur of Interstices Zahra Safavian Car Wash Megan Sapnar

    • IMAGE AND ANIMATION
      

      Flash Web Design: the art of motion graphics Hillman Curtis Flash production of Christina Manning's poem, Sky. Praystation. Joshua Davis

      Kaliber10000 Digital Web Nick Finck, curator A List Apart Captain Low-Rez and the Pixel of Destiny

    • Late additions
      

      Moholy-Nagy timeline. VeloCity (in Spanish)

• Communities
  

  Kaliber10000 Nervous Industries Geocaching the {fray}

  the {fray} organization Kvetch! Design for Community book community

• Eastgate . Serious Hypertext. (800) 562-1638 +1(617) 924-9044
• tech sites
  • PHP

Mark Bernstein

I've been delaying writing Mark Bernstein's bio for this site because he's one of the few people I've met, because he's likely to see this fairly quickly after I post it, and because I can't seem to spend more than fifteen minutes reading without running into his name in some acknowledgements or citations. He's founder and Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems; has written software for hypertext, for Macintoshes, for other things; has helped organize several ACM hypertext conferences and all of the eNarrative conferences; has written innumerable (well, to me) articles and papers on hypertext (some linked down the left side of his blog); and he's a nice guy. I can't make a comprehensive list of his primary interests in hypertext as I can with several other bios I'm working on, but he has written a good bit about the themes of structure, making hypertexts interesting with human touches and good storytelling, elegant linking, and accessibility.

Bill Bly

Bill Bly wrote one of my favorite hypertexts so far. And he seems to present hypertexts that work in a way that makes sense to me... as ways to connect fragments; tools for creating the gossamer spiderweb strands that bind and separate our more substantial thoughts; as masses of information for which the discovery of the structures is as integral to learning as is the information itself. There must be a better way to articulate that. I'm sure I'll find it as I read on.

I just discovered his blog within his personal site, and that's part of what has me writing this entry. I realize now that the people section of t.org is growing with a bias toward blogs. The blogosphere is fertilizing its growth, and it is responding ... blogotropically?

Bill has a page about his work with hypertext. He approaches it from a refreshing angle. Rather than looking into hypertext systems as tools for new work, he is approaching them as the lesser of evils: as attempts at software which are with regard to the way we think perhaps less flawed than the word processor, spreadsheet, or operating system. That's another take on one of the things that keeps me interested in the field-- I think hypertexts more accurately represent the ways we think and communicate.

J Yellowlees Douglas

J Yellowlees Douglas is an Associate Director of the University Writing Program and Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. She is the author of the first book I have read through for textuality. Eastgate has a better bio of her.

George Landow

Eastgate's bio sums up what I would put here: George Landow is Professor of English and Art History at Brown University. A leading scholar on Ruskin and Victorian literature and culture, Professor Landow is also internationally recognized as a theorist of hypertext application and design. He has written several books on hypertext critical theory, wrote the important early hypertext The Victorian Web, and has been a key player in the history of hypertext at Brown University. He has his own domain and his CV is online.

Donna Leishman

As I've been updating my four-year-old, barely-even-casual understanding of the field of hypertext, I've found a lot of out-of-date research, moribund works and communities. How wonderful, then, to last night find myself pulled into Donna Leishman's work. I met her at eNarrative2 in Boston and enjoyed her Red Riding Hood retelling. She did that for her Master's thesis, so it was a while before I saw anything more on her site 6amhoover. She's been very active, though.

Several years later, last night, I spotted Donna's name in a back issue of Tekka and was pulled right back into her work. I enjoyed the dark smirk of Red Riding Hood twice through and assigned myself The Bloody Chamber to read soon. I'm inspired by Donna's work... if she can tell these stories with such reception (including an Emmy nomination), perhaps there's a market out there. Perhaps even outside academe.

Linear Narrative in an Interactive Environment

The Leishman pieces I've seen so far are of a promising type: linear narrative playing out in an interactive environment where exploration is rewarded with additional depth. As Red Riding Hood walks to her Grandmother's house, you can click in her basket to read her diary... but you don't need to. In The Bloody Chamber, clicking on buildings in a cityscape sets them to walking around in an unnerving manner that sets the mood well. You can watch it like a movie if you want, but interacting with it will be rewarded.

Kate Stables wrote in the Guardian Online: Leishman strikes just the right balance between plot and charming distractions, packing enough secret scenes under the skin of her story to make a repeat viewing a must. I watched each of Leishman's pieces several times, and the feeling was like playing a good video game. I worked through the main narrative once, but then when I realized that there were easter eggs available, I started 'playing' through the stories again, looking for mouseovers, guessing at where I might find detail... I wound up engaging the setting of the story as more than background, as a place to read more... as a setting.

This seems like a development on one of the genres that hypertext has always done well, the mysterious environment. Red Riding Hood is Myst-esque, but with the narrative brought to the fore and set on a more demanding and prominent timeline. It seems like a useful development... the timeline can carry you along if you get stuck

Brainstorming, now: this works like DVDs, in a way. DVDs coming out now always have extra features. Some of the extras are material within the story, many of the extras are about the making of the movie or its setting in the rest of the world. Sometimes you have audio tracks where you can follow the movie but get only the actors' or director's comments as a form of "secret scenes under the skin" of every scene. Either way, you've got a narrative happening on several levels and the work encourages repeat viewings at various levels.

Hypulp: Hyperlinks in Print

The blog Hypulp recently posted article 3 in a series on hyperlinking metaphores in print design:

1. Hyperlinks in Print I - highlighted footnotes in International Design Magazine
2. Hyperlinks in Print II - visual cross-references and indexing in the Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design Directory
3. Hyperlinks in Print III - pop-up footnotes in The Atlantic Monthly

Print and web co-development?

The website designs of two of those publications directly mirror the printed product... I wonder if the two sides of the works were actually developed together.

From monologue to conversation

A lot of talk about hypertext circles around how hypertext does or doesn't emulate print. As hypertext matures and spreads