(hyper)textuality.org

Card Shark and Thespis 10/1/04 - Paper by Mark Bernstein

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.

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URL

Thespis

Citation

A Rationale for Teaching Hypertext Authoring in Literature Courses 10/10/04 - Paper by David Barndollar

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.