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Forepaper by
Jean-Hugues
Rety
for Messenger
Morphs the Media 99
Hyperfiction Structure: the Question of
Global Consistency
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The question of control of the reader's browsing behavior is
a central issue in hypertextual literary writing.
Fragmentation alone risks to breed chaos: a set of
independent lexias, without any order or structure, is much
likely to generate inconsistent readings. Such an
unstructured set of lexias may constitute a work by itself,
the writer may by striving to capture some chaotic
world... but here is not our concern: in most cases,
the writer wants to maintain control over the potential
readings, i.e., over the different sequences of lexias her
work allows for. Static links provide an answer: a work is a
directed graph whose nodes are lexias, and the reader
proceeds by following links. But for many use, this still
appears not satisfactory (1) and the
writer needs better, finer tools. Conditional links were
introduced with this aim, and proved to be a useful and
efficient tool in practice. However, providing the writer
with more power in specifying the potential reading orders
rises up another question: how can she maintain control over
these readings? For large hypertexts, it hardly seems
possible for the writer to be aware of all the potential
readings, and she wants to have some control over them
anyway. But how could she test thousands of possible paths?
Indeed, whenever she defines a conditional link, she imposes
a local constraint
on the reader's browsing behavior. On the other hand, she
wants to maintain a global control over
the structure that results from these local constraints
(2)... clearly,
there is no straightforward solution to the problem.
In this workshop, I would like to discuss control related
issues including the following questions:
- What kind of control does the writer want to possess over
the link structure of her writing? With what tools?
- Should this control be partial or total? In other words:
should the writer be able to secure consistency for all
potential readings? What actually is consistency in the
context of hyperfiction?
The link structure of hypertext has strong formal, logical
bases. Analysis and proof frameworks from research in
computer science may be adapted. In particular, I will
present at the Hypertext'99
conference a paper entitled Structure
Analysis for Hypertext with Conditional
Linkage in which I propose such a structure
analysis tool. I think that
this paper can pave the way to practical tools and
methodologies for the writer to gain a better control over
the structure of her writing. I would like to discuss these
issues with people experienced in hypertext writing.
Actually, the practical question is: what kind of tools
writers are expecting from system developers in order to
help them to design and control the structure of their
writings?
(1) See
for instance: Robert Kendall, Hypertextual Dynamics in
A Life Set for Two. Proceedings
of Hypertext'96.
(2) On
this subject, Robert Kendall wrote in Testing,
Testing : "It's relatively easy to ensure
that the reader's options at any given point will be
meaningful on a purely local level, but it's much more
difficult to foresee the cumulative results of all the
individual choices and to gauge whether every possible text
realization will be satisfying as a whole."
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