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Is this hypertext any good? Evaluating quality in hypermedia The
paper also asks if (1) hypertext has a
characteristic or necessary form of metaphoric
organization? (2) how important are gaps between
documents to successful hypertext? (3) What is the
relation between animated text and
hypertext. |
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What
is quality in hypertext? How, in other words, do we judge a
hypertext collection of documents (or web) to be successful
or unsuccessful, to be good or bad as hypertext? How can we
judge if a particular hypertext achieves elegance or just
mediocrity? Those questions lead to another: what in
particular is good about hypertext? What qualities does
hypertext have in addition to those possessed by
non-hypertextual forms of writing, which at their best can
boast clarity, energy, rhythm, force, complexity, and
nuance? What qualities, in other words, derive from a form
of writing that is defined to a large extent by electronic
linking. What good things, what desirable qualities, come
with linking, since the link is the defining characteristic
of hypertext? As I have argued elsewhere, the defining
qualities of the medium include multilinearity, consequent
potential multivocality, conceptual richness, and —especially
where informational hypertext is concerned— reader
centeredness or control by the reader (Hypertext
2.0, pp. 33-48). Obviously, works in a hypertext
environment that fulfill some or all of these potential
qualities exemplify quality in hypermedia. Are there other
perhaps less obvious sources of quality? Before
we can consider answering such a large question, or set
ofquestions, we must first distinguish between informational
and educational hypertext on the one hand and fictional and
poetic hypertext on the other. The first and chief reason
for doing so involves the concept of disorientation, which
fictional and poetic texts often employ as part of their
central project, but which appears only as an error –
as a result of poor writing – in nonfictional
hyperwebs. One question we must raise while trying to
identify sources of quality in hypermedia is, to what extent
do literary and informational hypermedia differ? In the
following pages, I shall propose several possible ways to an
answer these questions, each of which itself involves a
central issue involving this information technology. The
Victorian Web (victorianweb.org), an academic site
I manage that receives as many as fifteen million hits a
month, contains four basic kinds of documents: (1) overviews
(sitemaps), (2) link lists, (3) simple two-column tables
used primarily for art works and text describing them, and,
finally, (4) lexias containing primarily text, though some
may also include thumbnail images linked to larger plates.
Most text documents contain two to four navigation links in
the form of linked icons that appear at the bottom of each
lexia plus multiple text links that weave the lexia into a
miniature hypertext network. Although I find myself unable
to formulate any rule as to proper number of text links, I
have observed two things: (1) lexias approximately one to
two screens in length tend to have at least three text
links, and (2) as new documents arrive, older lexias receive
additional links. In
addition to the navigation links that appear at the left of
the screen, the main text also contains frequent
opportunities to follow links, which lead to other narrative
arcs. What
happens, however, when such discussions are unavailable?
What usually happens both in the websites I’ve
examined and those I manage is that the link of the compared
author – here Ruskin – goes to very basic or
general information about that figure. Notice that such a
link to general information, which may provide a kind of
basic identification of the figure for neophytes in the
field, is not necessarily a bad link. In fact, for certain
users, particularly those new to a particularly field or
subject, such a link destination might prove very useful.
Still, most users of documents about quite specific topics
require information that directly illuminates the main
subject at hand (in this case, Ruskin’s fairy tale).
The fact is, though , that such specific link destinations
are far more rare than the more general, glossary-type ones.
Obviously,
one would prefer to give readers a choice of information, in
this case providing both general and very specific
information, in part because such a choice offers a richer,
more user-centered embodiment of hypertextuality.
Unfortunately, the WWW, which at present allows only links
from a word or phrase to a single destination, does not
offer one of the most useful kinds of linking – the
one-to-many or branching link that offers the reader a
choice of destinations at the point of departure (see
Hypertext 2.0, pp. 12-14). One solution is to link
the anchor –here “John Ruskin”– to
another document, which has to be manually created, that
offers multiple choices. Depending on the subject of the
lexia in which this name appears, the link list or area
sitemap at the end of such a link can take the form of lists
of links to biographical information about “John
Ruskin,” those leading to his influence upon various
authors, and so on. Another approach to handling links to
several destinations, not always possible to implement,
requires adding phrases that might provide multiple anchors
in the departure sentence. Thus, one could link general
information to the figure’s name (John Ruskin) and
specific information only to phrases, such as “permeated
by his beliefs,” that lead the reader to expect a very
specific discussion at the destination lexia. Lyons
explains, “The placing of the parentheses” was
intended to “convey nested levels of associative
meaning . . . arranged hierarchically; that is, if I opened
one parenthetic set and then opened a second, this second
set I always made to close before the first. For example: (1
... (2 ... )2 ... )1.” Lyons explains that “the
piece’s parenthetically obsessive syntax closely
resembles that used in the entirely outmoded programming
language, LisP (more recently reincarnated under the name
Scheme).” Clicking on the screen within some
parentheses and outside others incrementally produces text.
Lyon’s poem, which he implemented in html, Storyspace,
and Visual basic, was, he tells us, originally written to be
read on paper with the intention of questioning “hierarchical
modes of organization” found in post-Chomskian
linguistics and implicitly confounded by hypertext, since,
as Nelson has pointed out, the shortcomings of
classification systems, all of which require hierarchies,
explain the need of hypermedia in the first
place.[3]
The pleasures of reading (box(ing)), I propose,
come from the discoveries of text the reader produces and of
the meanings of that quite difficult text. Stephanie
Strickland’s Vniverse, a much more complex
project than (box(ing)), represents a comparatively
rare example of literary hypermedia that aims both at
producing delighted surprise and the virtues associated with
information hypermedia —reader empowerment and
multivocality, or multiple approaches to a single general
subject. [4] Upon
opening Vniverse, one encounters a night sky —a
black screen speckled with stars— in which the central
portion rotates. A small circle appears at top right and a
slightly smaller one appears diagonally opposite at lower
left. Moving one’s mouse across the sky produces halts
the rotation and reveals various constellations. Meanwhile
instructions scroll across the bottom of the screen: “Scan
the stars . . . click once or click twice . . . click the
darkness.” Clicking on darkness brings forth a
constellation, a particular star with its assigned number,
and text that appears when one keeps one’s mouse over
the point at which one clicked. Typing a number in the top
right hand circle produces the star with that number and its
surrounding constellation. Like many hypermedia projects
that employ Flash and similar software, Vniverse
boasts animated text. Unlike many such projects, it
also emphasizes a high degree of reader control. Since
hypertext fiction and poetry often employ disorientation
effects for aesthetic purposes, coherent and relevant
linking might not seem to be necessary, but I suspect it’s
simply that coherence not take as obvious forms as it does
in information hypermedia. For example, our experience of
reading pioneering hyperfiction, such as Michael Joyce’s
afternoon, proves definitively that much of what we
have assumed about the relations of coherence to textuality,
fixed sequence, and the act of reading as sense-making is
simply false. Reading afternoon and other fictional
narratives shows, in other words, that we can make sense of —that
is, perceive as coherent— a group of lexias even when
we encounter them in varying order. This inherent human
ability to construct meanings out of the kind of discrete
blocks of text found in an assemblage of linked lexias does
not imply either that text can (or should) be entirely
random, or that coherence, relevance, and multiplicity do
not contribute to the pleasures of hypertext reading.
Movement in afternoon from a lexia containing, say,
the conversation of two men to one containing that of one of
their wives may at first appear abrupt (and hence random or
without any relevance), but continued reading establishes
the essential coherence of the link between the two lexias:
the movement between the one containing the men speaking and
the second containing the women can be repeated, thus
establishing a pattern like cinematic cross-cutting.
Similarly, the next lexia one encounters can reveal that the
words of one pair of speakers serve as the context, the
backstory, for the others.[5] In
hyperfiction, Michael Joyce invented this form of reified
comparison or allusion when he has links transport readers
from his story to passages from Plato’s
Phaedo, Vico’s New Science,
Basho’s The Narrow Road through the Provinces,
and poems by Robert Creeley and others. Perhaps the ultimate
source here is Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (to
which Joyce alludes in the lexia entitled “Hop
Scotch”). Frequently used, such
juxtapositions-by-linking produce the kind of collage
writing that appears to be very typical of hyperfiction and
poetry.[6] Such
combinations of literary homage to a predecessor text and
claims to rival it have been a part of literature in the
West at least since the ancient Greeks. But the physical
separation between texts characteristic of earlier,
non-electronic information technologies required that their
forms of linking —allusion and contextualization —
employ indicators within the text, such as verbal echoing or
the elaborate use of parallel structural patterns (such as
invocations or catalogues). Hypertext, which permits authors
to use traditional methods, also permits them to create
these effects simply by connecting texts. When successful,
such linking-as-allusion creates a pleasurable shock of
recognition as the reader’s understanding of the
fictional world suddenly shifts. One
can also create unifying metaphors or analogies that do not
refer to hypertext, the medium itself. David Yun's
Subway Story is a work of hyperfiction that employs
metaphors that inform the narrative in
“non-reflexive” modes. Subway Story,
which employs the organizational metaphor of the map for the
New York subway system: it includes both a map of that
system and a lexia for each of its stations. Hyperfiction
and poetry can have two very different kinds of gaps, the
first being those bridged or surmounted by links, the second
those that remain, well, gaps because nothing in the
software environment joins the two texts or lexias. Whereas
the first kind of gap, that joined by links, seems obvious
because we encounter it every time we follow a link, the
other is not. As an example of the second I am thinking
entire sections or narrative arcs in works like
Patchwork Girl that remain separate and separated
in the reader’s experience and yet may be joined by
allusion or thematic parallels. Thus, in Patchwork
Girl gatherings of lexias about the stitched-together
nature of the female Frankenstein monster reside in a
different folder or directory than those comprising Shelley
Jackson’s collage lexias composed of various texts from
Jacques Derrida, L. Frank Baum, and Mary Shelley. These
discrete sections join in variations on the themes of text,
stitched-together-ness, coherence, origins, and
identity. Particularly
in these early days of the history of these new technologies
and associated media, readers have a more difficult time
deciding whether to keep reading. The text they read must
persuade them to go on by the essential, traditional,
convention means –that is, by intriguing, tantalizing,
satisfying, and above all entertaining them. In a hypertext
lexia the reader must encounter text that is simultaneously,
perhaps paradoxically, both satisfying and just unsatisfying
enough: in other words, the current lexia readers encounter
has to have enough interest, like any text, to convince them
to keep reading, and yet at the same time it must also leave
enough questions unanswered that reader feels driven to
follow links in order to continue reading. In the terms of
Roland Barthes, the lexia must include sufficient plot
enigmas or hermeneutic codes to drive the reader forward.
This demand explains why the opening lexia of Michael
Joyce’s classic afternoon, perhaps the first
and still one of the most interesting hyperfictions, takes
the form of such ornate metaphorical prose. Here, for
example, is the second paragraph in
afternoon’s opening lexia
(“begin”): The
rich, sensual metaphoric style of this lexia promises reader
a lush reading experience and therefore makes them want to
keep reading, but this section is also self-contained enough
to cohere as a separate lexia. As anyone who has read
afternoon knows, not all its lexias have this
richness — some are quite bare and brief — but he
does employ this style elsewhere, for example, in
“Staghorn and starthistle.” Steve
Cook’s “Inf(l)ections” and Jeff Pack’s
“Growing up Digerate,” exemplify successful,
richly linked discursive hypertexts. Cook’s stands as
experiment in new forms of academic writing whereas
Pack’s experiment autobiography provides three
different kinds of organization that the reader can follow:
(1) a linear path arranged chronologically, (2) a
topic-driven reading facilitated by a sitemap in the form of
an alphabetical list, and (3) a multilinear narrative
provided by links scattered throughout the text of
individual lexias. Jackie Craven’s In the Changing
Room similarly allows both linear narrative, permitting
the reader to follow the story of a single character, or
move among the eight characters, each one in effect being
defined as a storyline, a narrative arc. As the introduction
says, “Click on an underlined word , and the stories
will merge and take new form. Your path will not be
straight. Here in the Changing Room, all things are
linked and everyone is a reflection . . . of a reflection .
. . of a reflection.” This
fundamental characteristic of digital textuality has another
instantiation in the form of animated text — text that
moves, even dances, on the computer screen, sweeping from
one side to the other, appearing to move closer to readers
or retreat away from them into a simulated distance. In its
simplest form, text animation simply involves moving the
text on screen a line at a time, essentially dispensing the
poem at a rate determined by the author. Kate Pullinger and
Talan Memmot’s elegant Branded (2003)
functions in this way. Such
text animation, often accompanied by sound, appears more
frequently in digital literary art than in discursive or
informational projects. For example, several of the animated
poems on the Dotze Sentits: Poesia catalona d’avui
CD-ROM (1996), such as Josep Palau i Fabre’s
“La Noia” and Feliu
Formosa’s “Ell surt de sota l’aigua,”
accompany the sound of the poet’s reading by moving
words and phrases of
different sizes and colors across the screen from top to
bottom and from edge of the screen to another; words pop in
and out of existence, too, as the text performs
itself.[7]
More radical experimentation with animated text appears in
Philadelpho Menezes and Wilton Azevedo’s
Interpoesia: Poesia Hipmedia Interativa (1998), in
which elements (or fragments) of both spoken and written
words react to the reader’s manipulation of the
computer mouse. Letters move, parts of words change color or
disappear, and sounds become layered upon one another as the
reader essentially performs the text using the sounds
provided. Moving
text on screen, which has only become possible for most
users with the advent of inexpensive computing power and
broad bandwith, has had an effect on digital literary arts
almost as dramatic as that of word-processing upon academic
institutions and the workplace. But are such projects
hypertextual (and does it matter)? In
one important sense, these projects, like Branded,
appear essentially anti-hypertextual. If one takes
hypertext to be an information technology that shares at
least some of the author’s power with the reader,
thereby producing what some theorists have termed a
“wreader,” then these animated texts enforce the
opposite tendency. In contrast to hypertext, they demand the
reader assume a generally passive role as a member of an
audience, rather than someone who has some say in what is to
be read. They add, in other words, to the power of the
author —or at least to the power of the
text—
and deny the possibility of a more empowered reader.
Strickland’s Vniverse, at which we’ve
already looked, represents a comparatively rare example of
text-animation hypermedia that strives to grant readers
control; it is, however, quite unusual. If
one were to arrange print text, hypertext, video, and
animated text along a spectrum, hypertext, perhaps
surprisingly, would take its place closest to print. Reading
written or printed text, one cannot change its order and
progression, but because the text is fixed on the page, one
can leave it, reading another text, taking notes, or simply
organizing one’s thoughts, and return to find the text
where one left it, unchanged. The characteristic fixity of
writing, therefore, endows the reader with the ability to
process it asynchronously — that is, at the convenience
of reader.[8]
Consider the difference of such fixed text from video and
animated text: if one leaves the television set to answer
the phone or welcome a guest, the program has moved on and
one cannot retrieve it, unless, that is, one has a digital
or analogue copy of it and can replay it. The very great
difference in degree of audience control between video as
seen on broadcast television and video viewed from storage
media, such as videotape or DVD, suggests that they should
be considered separate media. Still, since video, like
cinema, is a temporal form —a technology that presents
its information in necessary sequence— one generally
has to follow long patches of the story or program in its
original sequence to find one’s place in an interrupted
narrative. Animated text, in contrast, entirely
controls the reader’s access to information at the
speed and at the time the author wishes. One could, it is
true, replay the entire animated text, but the nature of the
medium demands that the minimum chunk that can be examined
takes the form of the entire sequence. Another
form of moving text appears in the timed links of Stuart
Moulthrop’s Hegirascope, links which
dramatically affect the reader’s relation to text. The
reading experience produced by these timed links contrasts
sharply with that possible with writing, print, and most
hypertext. Since the text disappears at timed intervals
outside the reader’s control, the characteristic fixity
of writing disappears as the document being read is replaced
by another. Some of the replacements happen so quickly that
this text enforces rapid reading, preventing any close
reading, much less leisurely contemplation of it. Michael
Joyce famously asserted that “hypertext is the revenge
of text upon television” by which I take him to mean
that hypertext demands active readers in contrast to
television’s relatively passive
audience.[9]
These examples of animated (or disappearing) text in
contrast appear to be extensions of television and film to
encompass and dominate text, or in Joyce’s terms, the
revenge of television (broadcast media) upon hypertext. This
is not necessarily a bad thing, any more than cinema is
worse than print narrative. Animated text, like cinema and
video, exists as an art form with its own criteria.
It’s just not hypertext. Within
this project of writing-as-discovery, all elements in a
hypertext system that can be manipulated can function as
signifying elements. To provide an example of the creative
use of system features, let us turn to a few very early
examples from Writing at the Edge (1994), all of
which were created in Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace, a
stand-alone hypertext environment available for both Windows
and Macintosh platforms. In
addition to containing traditional elements such as fonts,
graphics, sound, and color, Storyspace also supports the
creative utilization of “screen real estate”—
the tiling of windows and the order in which they appear and
arrange themselves. Nathan Marsh’s lexias in Breath
of Sighs place themselves around the screen, making the
screen layout support the narrative as one crosses and
re-crosses the tale at several points (Plate 10).
Marsh’s work, which dates from 1993, provided an early
demonstration that writing had become visual as well as
alphanumeric. It also reveals that a single software
feature, such as the ability to control window size and
location, leads directly to a particular mode of writing
— here writing as collage and montage in which the
multiple-window format permits readers to move back and
forth among overlapping lexias. This feature also encourages
active readers, since they can easily move about among
lexias once they have opened, thus creating a kind of
spatial hypertext. Several
other hypertexts from Writing at the Edge show the
imaginative deployment of another system feature of
Storyspace —the Storyspace view, a dynamic graphic
presentation of the arrangement of document organization.
Storyspace, a hypertext environment that also functions as a
conceptual organizer, permits authors to nest individual
spaces (lexias) inside others, or to rearrange the
hypertext’s organization by moving lexias without
breaking links. Some works, like Shelley Jackson’s
Patchwork Girl, take advantage of this graphic
organizational feature to structure hyperfiction by means of
separate folders or directories. Others, like Ho Lin’s
Nicely Done arranges all lexias on a single level
and indicates discrete narrative lines in his early
hyperfiction. This hypertext novel, which links a murder
story and the events of professional football championship
game, suggests its organization by arranging its lexias, all
of which appear on the top level, in four parallel lines.
Timothy Taylor’s LBJ —Lazarus + Barrabas
+ Judas— takes graphic indications of narrative and
conceptual organization farther than Ho Lin’s
Nicely Done, arranging its lexias in the form of
three crosses, the central one of which has a circle (halo?)
over it. Here, rather than indicating the narrative
structure, Taylor implies graphically something about the
subject and theme of his fiction. Adam Wenger’s
Adam’s Bookstore, which I have discussed
elsewhere, uses a circular deployment of the graphic
elements representing lexias in Storyspace View to indicate
that his document can be entered—and left—at any
point.[12]
One of the most bravura examples of arranging lexia-icons in
the Storyspace view appears in Marc A. Zbysznski’s
playful use of hundreds of them to create an image of a
human face beneath a recycling symbol. Even the naming of
lexias can provide opportunities for unexpected
signification. Andrew Durden’s playful arrangement of
lexias in Satyricon Randomly Generated
forms a grammatical sentence. Reading the titles of the
upper-level folders reveals the following playful comment:
“I / think this / lexia /is a good/start place.”
Stuart Moulthrop famously carried this playful use of system
features much farther, creating sonnets within a menu of
links! As
the previous examples from Storyspace suggest, hypertext
environments have, if not precisely McLuhan’s message
in the medium, at least certain tendencies that derive from
specific features of the software. The capacity to control
size and location of multiple windows encourages
collage-like writing that employs these features, just as
the presence of one-to-many linking and menus of links that
have a preview function encourage certain forms of
branching. Both features and the limitations or constraints
of these features encourage certain ways of writing, just as
the fourteen-line sonnet encourages certain kinds of
poetry. Turning
from Storyspace to html and WWW, by far the most widespread
form of hypermedia today, one wonders if it, like other
hypermedia environments, encourages certain modes of
writing. Html, which is basically an extremely simple text
formatting language that works on the internet, has two
defining features — first, the ability to insert links
between lexias and, second, the ability to insert other
media into individual lexias, originally just images but
soon after sound, video, and animation created by java
scripts or Flash. The rapid spread of access to broadband
connections to the internet has transformed the World Wide
Web from a simple system for linking text-representations
into a multimedia platform. The implications of this change
for anyone trying to determine the message in the medium are
obvious: whereas earlier proprietary systems, such as
Intermedia, Microcosm, Hypercard, Storyspace, Guide, and so
on, had built-in, clearly defined characteristics, some of
which provided clear limitations, the WWW does not. Anyone
working with basic html encounters certain obvious
features, which may act as imitations. These include the
absence of one-to-many linking, preview features, preview
functions, and inability to place and control the size of
windows. Anyone using Flash or Java in html documents,
however, does not necessarily confront any of these
limitations, though they may confront others, such as
incompatibility with particular versions of browsers. Such
freedom, such absence of limitations, brings with it the
relative absence of those restraints that often both limit
and inspire creativity. Works
cited [1]
In
my earlier work, beginning in 1987, I have attempted to
sketch out the beginnings of a rhetoric of hypertext and
hypermedia, and one way of answering the question, “Is
this hypertext any good?” involves looking at the
degree to which a particular hypertext observes some of
these minimal stylistic rules. This essay, however, tries to
broaden the question, looking for other sources of aesthetic
pleasure and success. For the rhetoric of hypermedia, see
chapter 5 in Hypertext 2.0. |
