So You Thought You Understood Hypertext?

___by Jennifer Ley


"The World Wide Web is, of course, a huge and wonderful hypertext -- a docuverse."

--Mark Bernstein, president and chief scientist for Eastgate Systems, Inc. (The word docuverse was coined by Ted Nelson.)


Hypertext, hypertext, hypertext ... the term has become a buzzword reaching far beyond the digital arts literary community, a word that at once defines the links that make the Internet itself such a powerful associative universe, a word that also describes a still relatively new form of digital writing, in which the authors create literary works that allow readers to search out and create their own plot line and story development.

When hypertext first emerged, there was no visual World Wide Web, no html markup language. Writers who wished to organize their content in a non-linear fashion looked to print for their earliest models, to the work of authors like James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon, whose non-linear narratives set the stage for a new method of story-telling. Using computer programs like Storyspace, created by Michael Joyce, Jay Bolter and John Smith, and further developed and marketed by hypertext publisher Eastgate Systems, and Macintosh's HyperCard, the first hypertext authors were able to split a narrative into parts and provide unique paths for each, in essence giving characters, concepts or subplots a different point of view, and the reader a means to search out and create a unique reading experience.

But as soon as the World Wide Web, html markup language and higher baud rates made the Internet as we know it today a reality, hyperlinking became the underlying structure for how the web functioned. Search out your favorite writer on one of the search engines. Click on one of the myriad choices of web sites that result from the search. Read story A, which has been republished on the web with illustrations, one of which is credited to an artist whose work appears on a linked web site. Follow that link, finding a recommendations page to more sites for that artist, including a list of museums showing his/her work in the near future. Click on the link, and you've gone from reading your selected author in cyberspace to planning a flesh-time trip to the National Gallery of Art. You've just had a hypertext experience. But a rather limited one, given what's available.

Hypertext literature and digital arts are a far cry from wandering in the full wash of the Internet's associative ocean, and at times, something the web itself can't actually show you. The following first hand accounts by authors of hypertexts reveal much about what makes this form of writing special:

Deena Larsen: "I wrote a series of stories about women in a Colorado mining town. But the stories weren't enough to show the relationships --some too secret for words, some the characters didn't understand. So I put the stories in little houses on a model train set and strung different colored embroidery thread to show different connections. But you could not follow the two inch-thick maze of thread. My friends were very supportive. Comments included: 'You idiot. Do this on a computer. Here is how to work HyperCard. Now get this thing out of my basement.'

Now, that Marble Springs has been authored in hypertext you can explore the virtual ghost town by clicking on links. Connection cards with different patterns symbolize each connection. Marble Springs is a collaborative hypertext where readers can add their own stories and connections. It's available from Eastgate."

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, who writes hypertext fiction as M.D. Coverley: "I had been waiting to write in hypermedia all of my life. In 1995, I received an N.E.H. grant to study "New Technologies in Literature" with Katherine Hayles at UCLA. This gave me the background and support to begin writing Califia, a novel-length story of the search for a lost paradise in California. The instant that I began to write this novel on the computer, I knew I had arrived in my perfect medium. The opening page is not a text/book at all, it is a shoreline scene, full screen, with flamenco music; the reader clicks on footsteps in the sand to begin the story. Soon, the reader can choose among three narrators, travel in four directions, wander at will among the accounts of five generations of Californians, dreaming of redemption. All of this is to point out the incredible difference between linear text and a multilinear, hypermedia experience, where the image, sound, structure and print are all text. The possibilities of telling stories with information and meaning encoded in many sensory elements continues to intrigue me as a writer. I finished Califia in 1998, and it will be published by Eastgate Systems in the fall. Meantime, I invite curious readers to sample a free Beta version of the novel on CD-ROM, available now by request, from my home pages."

Stand alone software (like Storyspace and HyperCard) gives hypertext authors much more control over what the reader sees and how he/she sees it when viewing a serious hypertext work (more on the definition of 'serious' later.) And though recent advances in java, javascript, and dynamic html are giving web authors more options than your standard link-and-click, the fact remains that the two major browsers don't always 'see' things the same way. Viewers' computer operating systems do or don't contain author-specified fonts, Macs and pcs have a horrible habit of presenting picture and font sizes with just enough difference to make a graphic designer consider tossing the monitor out the window, and the range of plug-ins necessary to actually experience some hypertext web work is constantly changing.

Thus some hypertext authors, like Robert Kendall, who has been teaching hypertext since 1995 in a course he developed for the New School for Social Research (a course also offered over the web), has at times written his own computer code to achieve the look or word delivery system he's after for a particular piece. In a hypertext poem like A Life Set for Two, where words arrive at programmed intervals, interrupting the viewer's expectation of what the text will say 'next', the software is a core component of the literary experience itself. Writing only for one platform, Kendall is assured that when his work is published on disc, you're going to see relatively the same vision he had.

Or, to put it another way, hypertext, which was designed to give you choices, can give you more specific, author defined choices.

But Kendall is also pioneering work on a library of web-specific javascripts which will give hypertext authors even more flexibility when structuring texts on the web. In hypertext, it's not uncommon to see the author seek out a new means of programming language and use its specific features to design not only the presentation, but the actual concept and structure of a new piece. Like an infinite possibility of memotic neural paths, the aids that allow hypertext authors to create their work offer specific assets, depending on the tools themselves. Both dhtml and javascript change the way authors and readers think about linking, as both languages allow the same page to carry multiple layers of information, which the author can make available at strategic points in the narrative.

What does all this mean for poets and poetry? To quote from my own editorial at The Astrophysicist's Tango Partner Speaks, the first hypertext poetry site I developed on the net:

"... when I think about the experience of reading poetry, I am immediately struck by how intuitive a process it is to enter the world of another writer's symbol and language architecture. Often what I'll perceive about a poem isn't something I can describe - to describe it would be to weaken the thought construct the poem has painted in my mind. But the poem will often make me think of a particular piece of art or, of another poem by another author.

Hypertext linked poetry sites allow an editor to act as a neural tour guide - to build layer upon layer of image. An editor can amplify a specific image or emotion, or veer off into aligned but separate territory all together."