Hypertext: Terry Harpold

The best current definition of hypertext, over quite a broad range of types is “text structure that cannot be conveniently printed”.

.. The “traditional seriality and definite order of the printed page invoked by Nielsen – much of hypertext theory has embraced the supposed tidiness of print as an axiom of system design – is deniable only in relation to the persistence of counter-serial and otherwise disorderly practices of writing and reading with paper and ink.

By hypertext, I simply mean non-sequential writing.  A magazine layout, with sequential text and inset illustrations and boxes, is thus hypertext.  So is the front page of a newspaper, and so are various programmed books now seen on the drugstore stands (where you make a choice at the end of the page and are directed to other specific pages).

.. Many people consider these forms of writing to be new and drastic and threatening.  However,, I would like to take the position that hypertext is fundamentally traditional and in the mainstream of literature.  Nelson (1990)

.. hyper-text as text’s liberated possibility

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What Writers Can Learn From ‘Goodnight Moon’

How wonderful that this oddly compassionate moment, where even nobody gets a good night, shows up in the picture book that is the most popular! There is no template, ever. When writing, how do we allow those moments of impulse, of surprise? How do we not censor that kind of leap? (I’d argue for following tangents — for not feeling bound to the topic at hand.) And when to end a story or poem or novel or essay? It’s one of the most common questions at readings: “How do you know when it’s done?”

.. The reader has time to linger with that end and accept it — it’s not the obvious closing note of the music, it’s not the fully resolved major chord. But she trusted it. How something ends is so much about a writer training her own instinct and her own sense of that note.

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext (Anthem Scholarship in the Digital Age)

This book explores the history of hypertext, an influential concept that forms the underlying structure of the World Wide Web and innumerable software applications. Barnet tells both the human and the technological story by weaving together contemporary literature and her exclusive interviews with those at the forefront of hypertext innovation, tracing its evolutionary roots back to the analogue machine imagined by Vannevar Bush in 1945.

.. ‘Belinda Barnet has given the world a fine-grain, blow-by-blow report of how hypertext happened, how we blundered to the World Wide Web, and what other things electronic literature might still become.’ —Ted Nelson, hypertext pioneer

 

MetaFilter: What happened to hypertext fiction?

Am I the only one who is sad that hypertext isn’t much more than plain old webpages that are fairly static (DHTML notwithstanding)?

Again, look at any reasonably sophisticated videogame like Deus Ex or Fallout or GTA IV. The people who imagined hypertext novels were thinking too small. Artists can create entire worlds now to explore along a nearly infinite number of degrees of freedom. Why limit yourself to one dimensional text with a few branches?

.. Has anyone actually tried to read any of the early hypertext stories? Good lord, what a frustrating experience. It truly was an experiment in just how far down the rabbit hole you can go before you become utterly confused and have lost any grasp on the thread you thought you were following. My mother has Alzheimer’s and a hypertext story must surely be what her day is like, as you jump from one focus to another and forget where you were two pages back.

.. Whoa. I take that back. A couple of the entries totally fall under the hypertext banner and they are amazing. Check out The Play and The Binary.

.. I thought this was perceptive and could also be applied to contrasting hypertext with IF. Hypertext fiction is stateless: no past, no future, only the current page. This makes it a fundamentally different experience, not just vs. novels, but also vs. (most) interactive fiction. In novels, there’s a clear beginning and end; likewise, in most interactive fiction, some of your actions will affect the world of the story, so you can also divide things mentally into cause and effect, past and future. Hypertext doesn’t have that anchor.