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Is Hypertext Literature Dead?
First time accepted submitter dylan_k writes "In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a lot of buzz about ideas like 'hypertext literature' and 'electronic literature.' Nowadays, it's easier to create those things than ever before, and there are plenty of digital texts but it just doesn't seem like authors are writing any new 'hypertext' literature these days. Why?"
There was buzz about delivery pet food too.
Just because there's buzz, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
If you consider a catalog of information to be Literature, then yes, Wikipedia is Literature.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
I don't know if I got the "hypertext literature" bit too well, but I think blogs are literature as much as books. So I don't believe that only because the format is different, "hypertext literature" is in itself dead.
Maybe human brain is massively parallel at physical level, but it is NOT multithreaded when it comes to consiousness and thinking. It is really hard to write fiction with multiple hyperlinked threads. It is also not very pleasant to read, therefore not much demand and not much supply. Simple.
because it's a crap idea, just like choose your own adventure books stop being interesting once you hit puberty and discover girls
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Well, one could argue it was never born in the first place.
[Incidentally, does that make it an abortion?]
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Considering how much fiction is on Wikipedia, I think the man's question is valid.
It's called Wikipedia.
... but I would say lack of money, i.e. no commercial potential. Lots of endeavors are difficult, but if they pay off, great. If not, not so great.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
But I don't think there's money to be made in hypertext fiction. Please, show me I'm wrong, I think I could create some content, but I don't know anyone paying for it.
That programs with goto's are not more readable than the ones without them. Programming and writing literature are both exercises in attention span management.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I haven't read TFA, but if the summary is anything like right, then they are dead wrong. From very recently,
http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/
http://www.pottermore.com/
And more people are reading more than ever before using hypertext - fiction, fact, opinion - every kind of literature you can think of. I think it's called the web, or something.
The concept of "literature" as purely book-bound started to die when Dickens published as serials in magazines, short stores and bound novels, and also by reading extracts from his work on lecture tours. It was inevitable that ideas like hypertext would find new forms of expression. The premise of the article seems to be as if the car industry had developed by building tractor units to replace horses, and then never got around to the idea of combining them with the passenger wagon. The first motor vehicles were simply tractors. We don't look at the roads now and say "Whatever happened to the idea of pulling carts with engines?"
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Because it turns out that it is great for documentation, hence Wikipedia, but a really lousy way to tell a narrative.
It's really very simple. When you're reading literature, you WANT the writer to have made those decisions. That's the writer's job. The story decisions are the heart of what makes a collection of stories into literature. Otherwise, you're just creating a world and throwing a reader into it to do the work of building his own story. There's nothing wrong with it for the tiny minority who want to do it, of course, but for the vast majority of people, having someone else make those artistic decisions and give them a satisfying story -- with interesting twists along the way before arriving at an interesting end -- is what makes reading literature worth doing. The people who favor the reader-driven plots don't really understand what literature is. As others have pointed out, hypertext stories are simply games. There's nothing wrong with that format, but it's neither fish nor fowl. People who want a good linear narrative story are best served by a traditional book. Those who want an interactive game are best served by graphics-heavy games. Hypertext stories serve a tiny niche that will never grow, IMO.
Brad: The Game
Back when I had an overnight job I spent a whole night playing around on that twisted "chose your own adventure" game/hypertext story.
Really, I think the best "hypertext" books were the Broaderbund Dr. Seuss stories I got for my daughter. They really were pretty cool and brought the book to life. The Ted Talk I watched last night sort of approached the subject as well.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Other people are complaining that Wikipedia isn't really "literature" because it's non-fiction, so how about Cracked.com instead? It does have a passing acquaintance with facts but its primary intent is clearly to entertain.
;)
In fact, according to wikipedia "Texts based on factual rather than original or imaginative content, such as informative and polemical works and autobiography, are often denied literary status, but reflective essays or belles-lettres are accepted." So wikipedia says wikipedia may not be literature, but Cracked.com is.
(Note that i'm not going to argue about the quality of Cracked.com, but the question wasn't if any _good_ hypertext literature was being written
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Though it wasn't hyperlink, I have read a few works of fiction that seemed to think it was neat to put gobs of stuff in footnotes. Now these weren't footnotes that explained obscure things the reader might not know to be skipped if you understood, it was explaining a completely fictional concept/historical event in the universe of the work in question.
This thoroughly breaks the flow no matter how you slice it. If you can't work some material more naturally into the narrative than hyperlinks/footnotes/jarring parentheticals, then something is very wrong. It severely detracts from the enjoyment of the story if I stop mid sentence to read it. If I chose to defer reading the material, then some things may make no sense until I get to the footnote and I have to figure out where the footnote ties back into the narrative in some cases where it isn't quite self-evident.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
There's links all over this page!
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Submitter, meet Wikipedia.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
As so often, the proponents of this forget that technology can only ease the least significant step in writing, namely replication. Creation of the content is a creative act and "hyperlinked" literature is very hard to create. I might also point out that there were examples of this long before the web, with manual links ("go to page xyz, section a") and that never caught on either, for exactly the same reason.
People that are surprised here do not understand content creation at all and vastly overestimate the worth of technology in aiding creativity. It is almost nil. What the Internet can do well in this regard is content delivery/content replication, but that is it. Does not make writing the stuff any faster or easier.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
First, like any other piece of literature, you need a narrative that's going to keep the reader's attention. A fancy interface only goes so far if the underlying message is boring.
Second, you need an interface that's going to complement the story. If you litter your text with hypertext links and call it a day, you're doing favors to nobody.
Third, both writing and coding something worthwhile take effort, and doing both at the same time, with the intent of making them work well together, takes even more effort than doing either separately. Frankly, it's just not worth it much of the time.
There are narratives that work well in a hypertext medium, though. Two that come to mind are Hobo Lobo of Hamelin, a fable that's being written slowly but surely, and Bear 71, a 20 minute 'interactive documentary'.
Well, I for one consider "Literature" to be a narrative flow set out by the author, that I enjoy following. So "Hypertext Literature" is not dead or alive, it's an oxymoron.
"Literature" in itself of course *maybe* just evolved in a day and age where it was the only technical means to convey either storytelling or discussion. Which both have a feedback from the audience. And I think "Hypertext Discussion" is pretty alive today, and there might be good ways to create hypertext storytelling experiences.
In "storytelling" for example, the storyteller just telling the "and then the prince arrived on his mighty stallion" might be interrupted by the question "when was the stallion born and where?" by someone in the audience. *THAT* could be implemented quite good in hypertext.
Of course, it always was (;-)) Hyperlinks were invented for footnotes and case citations.
For a quick look, see What's hot on CanLII This Week. I love the Leroy Smickle case described there (go to then end of the case link for the link array )
In literature, of course, they're pretty much a done fad.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
The genre was killed off by a gag book in 2003, "Escape from Fire Island. It's a gay zombie hyperlink novel: "If you run toward the nearest ferry terminal, turn to page 44. If you flirt with the cute twink, turn to page 55. If you throw caution to the wind and join the nearest circuit party, turn to page 80." It was published as a paper book, and was badly timed -- the gay novel boom was over, and the zombie novel boom was years in the future.
Because hypertext doesn't lend itself well to fiction. There isn't really much that you can add to a story with hypertext, and while a branching storyline sounds interesting in theory, that's exactly what it is: An interesting idea. By now the idea has been explored and found to be lacking.
Hypertext is great for non-fiction text, and I hope that the "revolution in textbooks" that Apple is trying - and the momentum that this will create for competition, results in more utilization in that sphere. A history book would be excellent if it were heavily interlinked, because most historic events are heavily interdependent with other events, with persons, locations, etc. etc.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
for certain meanings of 'game controller'
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
In "storytelling" for example, the storyteller just telling the "and then the prince arrived on his mighty stallion" might be interrupted by the question "when was the stallion born and where?" by someone in the audience. *THAT* could be implemented quite good in hypertext.
And I thought effective world-building was both very hard to do right, and very impressive when done right, before you had to anticipate all possible audience questions and have good answers for them.
And in the last century, Ulysses is a work of literature in which not very much happens and there is little plot, it is just the (frequently very entertaining) account of two very different people wandering around Dublin on 16th. June 1904, and the way in which their paths cross.
There is no reason why a hypertext should not be literature, and the objection only makes sense if you think literature is storytelling - which most of it is not.
* I know people from many other cultures have the tendency to obey orders even from crazy people, but Moby-Dick is above all an
novel.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Interesting that TFA has this quote near the bottom:
“With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. ..a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do..” — Kenneth Goldsmith
I completely disagree. Photography and painting are different art forms; and telling a story linearly is different from giving the reader the option of following different paths through a hypertext document.
Bottom line is that good writing is already hard to do, adding this extra dimension makes it beyond the ability of most writers (and readers).
In "storytelling" for example, the storyteller just telling the "and then the prince arrived on his mighty stallion" might be interrupted by the question "when was the stallion born and where?" by someone in the audience. *THAT* could be implemented quite good in hypertext.
It could also be implemented quite well by telling the person asking the question to give up with the irrelevant questions. Possibly followed by the application of a captive-bolt gun.
You mean you never read those "choose your own adventure" books as a kid, keeping a stack of two or three pages back with your fingers in case Captain Kirk died so that you could pop your way back up the stack and try another path? Now imagine that, but with a back button.
Or perhaps better literature....
I could see this being interesting with an ensemble cast in which you get to choose which people to follow, and you end up reading the story from different perspectives, learning what the other characters were doing from conversations, etc.—one story, many variations.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
2 that come to mind are the SCP wiki & some groups of entries on Everything2
Authors are as a class people who are in love with words, specifically their own. When they write a novel, they want the reader to consume it from beginning to end, not missing a single word. So for them, there isn't much joy in pouring a significant amount of work into a target hypertext segment where 90% of the readers will miss it. And if it's going to be skipped over anyway, why waste time polishing their words? What's the point of them coming up with a secondary narrative flow that is in no way essential to the plot? On the other hand, if the hyperlinks are essential, meaning the reader is obliged to click on every link to get a full understanding of the plot, then at best it's no longer a novel, but a puzzle or gimmick. (Which are fine endeavors, no doubt, but the cross-section of high quality puzzle-creators and good novelists is rather small, and the people who care to do both at once, even smaller. (Think of parentheses as proto-hypertext, for instance. How many authors can successfully place parentheses within parentheses, without the whole exercise turning into a mess (and how many would even attempt such foolishness)?)) And at worst you have an exercise in tedium, both in terms of reading and in terms of creation.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Hypertext doesn't respect intellectual property boundaries. Linking is stealing! </sarcasm>
Does anyone know easy to use Mac programs to create hypertexted documents?
Bert
The best case for Hypertext Literature is the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. Those evolved into the old Infocom games which turned into the Sierra games which turned into RPG games which evolved into MMOs. If you want to do Hypertext Literature, pick one of the various forms of evolution and be done with it.
...but isn't it everywhere around us and called 'the Web' ?!?
It amazes me to see so many people claiming Wikipedia, the web or even bloody YouTube refutes the article's thesis. These are not literature in the sense TFA uses -- just as pre-web media like the daily paper, ads, movies, TV shows, encyclopedias ...
Do you believe hypertext is done evolving? (hint: the creator of word hypertext, Ted Nelson, doesn't think so - see quote, below).
Hypertext is still very young compared to writing. Our species has been working on writing for over 5,000 years, and on hypertext for about 60 years (original memex article, 1945 (a fascinating read, btw - worth ten minutes of your time)
2) Who even likes non-linear stories?
Show me any medium where non-linear fiction is popular. Did you actually enjoy Memento? There are precious few examples of popular non-linear fiction in any medium, including hypertext. (by "precious few" I mean that percentage-wise you can round the amount of non-linear works down to zero and still be reasonably close to the actual number).
3) Non-linear may just be too much work to read? (related to 2)
Humans love stories, but they have significant processing limitations. Fiction is supposed to be entertaining (or at least interesting). (Hypothesis: reading non-linear fiction requires too much work to be fun, so nobody likes it.)
4) What if you are looking in the wrong place for non-linear "fiction".
Try here with games like Adventure, A History for your fiction.
Or possibly here: simulation games
In these cases, "fiction" has proven very popular indeed.
("But, But, that isn't serious fiction!"
*shrug* Maybe not.
But then again, maybe games and simulations are simply what non-linear fiction looks like.
Centuries from now, scholars may be studying the ground breaking work of great non-linear authors likeWilliam Crowther and John Carmack in much the same way that visionary creatives like Shakespeare and Mary Shelly are studied today.
So... about the evolution of HyperText:
Ted Nelson, the creator of the term hypertext, was unimpressed with HTML:(excerpt from here)
Trying to fix HTML is like trying to graft arms and legs onto hamburger. There's got to be something better-- but XML is the same thing and worse. EMBEDDED MARKUP IS A CANCER. (See my article "Embedded Markup Considered Harmful", WWW Journal, 1997 or 1998.) The Web is a special effects race, FANFARES ON SPREADSHEETS! JUST WHAT WE NEED!. (Instead of dealing with the important structure issues-- structure, continuity, persistence of material, side-by-side intercomparison, showing what things are the same.) This is cosmetics instead of medicine. We are reliving the font madness of the eighties, a tangent which did nothing to help the structure that users need who are trying to manage content. The Xanadu® project did not "fail to invent HTML". HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT-- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management. The "Browser" is an extremely silly concept-- a window for looking sequentially at a large parallel structure. It does not show this structure in a useful way.
(emphasis added).
Ted raises some interesting points; it is hard for me to think that HTML is the be-all and end-all of information.
I don't know that his "zigzag" thing is ever going to get traction, but
There you go: a popular work of not-necessarily linear fiction. All those footnotes break the flow of the narrative and yet people love the book. It's not the only example, nor is it the most out-there.
Orion's arm is fantastic new hypertext literature - plus its open source. Check it out if you like good science fiction. From its homepage;
"Welcome to Orion's Arm, a scenario set thousands of years in the future where civilization spans the stars. Godlike ascended intelligences rule vast interstellar empires, and lesser factions seek to carve out their own dominions through intrigue and conquest. And out beyond the edge of civilized space and the human friendly worlds, adventure awaits those prepared to risk all.
Come join us in this ever-expanding collective worldbuilding effort. Within the vast universe that is Orion's Arm you will find:
Hard Science
Plausible Technology
Realistic Cultural Development
A vast Setting
10,000+ years of historical development
Realistic Exobiology"
http://www.orionsarm.com/
I read to find out what happens next, not to control it.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Yeah, but what stops you from using HTML with plenty of crosslinks to write your own hypertext 'literature' ? It seems to me that it would just be a self-enclosed subset of the Web. I don't see what more there is to it.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Dude. I know the concept, thought I invented it while pulling an herbally influenced all nighter in college. I stayed up endlessly trying to write James Joyce worthy digressions and offshooting paragraphs which violated the system (both because I was violating the rules on "digression", and because I had a term paper due I was procrastinating). The next morning, I found out it was crap, or at best would have taken an exponential number of days to edit. For now, traditional allusions and/or sequels are the way to go, time is better spent writing a linear story with foreshadowing and allusions to other works.
Someday, perhaps, a future, more highly evolved being may find hypertext lit enjoyable as an art form, but I doubt they would want to read MY hypertext lit, which would seem to them like a volume of encyclopedias written by second graders or cave men. That future being will find anything we write to be sophomoric, but will perhaps get high and try to invent calculus literature, to be pondered by a yet further evolved being...
Gently reply
You've never heard my wife tell stories, its completely non-linear with plenty of non-sequester tangents that revelel more than the main story arc does, before abruptly switching back to the main story, which now is really just a tangent to the previous tangent. You can participate in the piece, but emphasizing a word in the story with a facial remark or a brief "huh?" which will will start off another tangent related to that word, which may or may not become the main story.
Its pretty awesome to behold. I think I'm the only one who really loves her stories.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
What is the literary problem that hypertext is solving? In most cases there's no need for it. Infinite Jest might work better with hyperlinks -- if you can stand reading something like that on a screen.
There's tons of literature on the web now. If you write poetry or fiction and you're name isn't Stephen King or something, that's where you're publishing. In fact there is a good deal of literature in html format, but most of it doesn't use hyperlinks because the work doesn't call for it.
I write fiction and poetry and publish on the web. I'll use hyperlinks when i feel a need to. I haven't so far. Maybe when i set something in the mid-nineties...
Indeed, that quote is garbage. I've added Kenneth Goldsmith to my list of idiots.
Photography made the mechanical production and reproduction of images possible. As far as writing goes, the web has made for a change in the mode of distribution, but writers are still stringing words together. That hasn't changed since the Babylonians. It's not going to, either.
Gutenberg and typewriters brought bigger changes than hypertext.
Because you cannot read a hypertext from beginning to end.
Cool - mod parent "+1 Useful" :-)
r.e. Tree Style Tab
One of the earliest and best counter-examples. Motteux's footnotes are hilarious and the translation is greater than the sum of its parts. I never dared ask him but I'm fairly sure Pratchettt knows it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The old "adventure" games like Colossal Cave adventure, are called "interactive fiction" these days, which says it all.
FWIW I think authors tend to be quite precious when it comes to their manuscripts - they have firms ideas how the plot should play out, so giving the reader a choice in the matter will only appeal to a particular kind of jobbing writer. It's probably for the best - imagine how confusing it would be discussing a story with your friend, when you both took entirely different choices during the process of reading it.
A lot of people pointed out various problems with hypertext fiction, but I think one of the bigger ones is the fact that an author wants a story read from beginning to end so that they don't waste effort on stuff the reader won't read. A lot of people have also mentioned that most examples of hypertext fiction have instead been called games, and I think a successful one would probably need to be approached more like developing a game than writing a story, with multiple writers branching off of a main trunk and working collaboratively. It could be an opportunity to explore different characters, ideas or settings that the trunk hints at but doesn't develop fully. So, in a sense, one could consider all of those "universe" novels (e.g. Star Wars universe, Star Trek universe) to be hypertext fiction of a sort, since that's essentially what they do.
...as in "documentation and manuals," I can say that it's a royal pain to write, test and deploy. Not to mention edit.
In the type of stuff I write, it's very useful to have linked content. However, I can see nothing compelling in casual reading that cries for linked content.
Not to mention the near-certainty that the medium would rapidly become taken over by advertisers, like the current blogosphere. I want to spit nails whenever I accidentally brush over an ad-linked word, a #@!!@@!!! popup appears.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
I'm thinking actual novel, not a pick your own adventure.
Why not do it through an intricate set of links on character's names? Every name when mentioned the first time in interaction, would be linked to the current story from their point of view. It would be interesting as a collab.
Everyone writing one POV, but must interact per scenes.
I would go with an arc and definite plotline, and leave ALL subplots to the interaction as it developed.
Hypertext is good when you're discussing a high level topic, and you need to define the building blocks you're standing upon.
Debunking the Epicurean Fallacy
God spoke to me
In fact it's still probably http://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/bookshelf/hyper/mgi/"> the largest hyperfiction ever written. It's not very good and I'm not very proud of it. The reason people aren't writing things called 'hyperfictions' any more is because they're now writing things called 'role playing games' - but they're still immersive non-linear narratives.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
That's funny. A half hour ago, I walked out of a literature conference keynote at which the speaker showed a proliferation of digital literature. It's not the sort of stuff that was pushed by companies like StorySpace; it was much weirder. But there's a ton of it out there. Again, not fiction, mostly various sorts of work conceived of as some sort of poetry. One notable source was the two-volume Electronic Literature Collection; you can also google "new media" or "digital media" perhaps combining those things with "literature." I think one reason that "hypertext" isn't going anywhere is that the people calling for it or imagining it aren't or weren't so good at imagining what people would want to do with the hypertextual and other possibilities of digital texts. It seems to be that the people really into it are those who also like Joyce and Stein. I will say, though, that there's a boom in hyperlinked literature, stuff with media links and such in it, as we can see with the iStuff that Apple is iPushing right now. I'll throw one more brick before I go read the other comments here: most readers of "absorbtive" or engrossing fiction want the author to carry them into another world, want to get lost in the author's creation. Fewer people are interested in the iterative or resistant text (like the French New Novel) or the (snarkily-labeled) choose-your-own-adventure type fiction.
I guess the main reason is that it is very difficult to really use the possibilities in the right way. What replaces the storyline? I think what comes closes to "Hypertext literature" are games. And even there the balance between the hardcore gamers, who want to explore the level for 80h and the casual gamers who want to finish the game in an evening usually goes wrong.
There's a great, ongoing hypertext literature site here: http://www.scp-wiki.net/
I believe the pinnacle of the Hypertext Novel was the MUD, which was very much a digital "choose your own adventure" book with some interactivity with other 'readers' thrown in.
MUDs are still around, I believe, and have evolved into MMORPGs by some people's interpretation...
Hi Mr. Cold Wet Dog.
I've been keeping my eyes on this for years now.
It's been more prevalent in *non-fiction*, where Wikipedia is the poster example. In about 3 hours today I finally understood the Car Lingo of My Cousin Vinnie. (What is Four Degrees Before Top Dead Center?)
In Fiction, yes, the authors have slacked off a bit. Done right it becomes Dragon's Lair or Choose Your Own Adventure. We're still locked into the classical style from inertia by the big media companies that don't want to do any work to package 6 endings into a book.
Meanwhile, also nonfiction, talk about timing - after months of a fairly lame sig here, I finally switched it to actually announce my (Alpha 0.1 level) site:
(Shameless Plug) http://www.freevoteusa.com/ (/Shameless Plug) - Please enable Javascript.
I found a program that lets me produce Javascript dynamic nodes that let you expand and collapse topics. One day I'd write a story like that with footnotes - you could breeze through the story or you could wander down the Chapter Notes to look at Moore's Law, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 'University of the North Window' (they had so many University Political Prisoners that they got fed up and taught classes in the Gulag Prisons!). And more. I very distinctly remember a footnote by Mr. S. that said "If I ever have time I want to write a story about ...". He might be out of time, I might have time to weakly honor his request with my feeble story skills.
Point is, the Academics might be as much as ten years ahead of the curve. The existing companies want to make money on existing products, so they mold the landscape. But I am a champion of the HyperText Writing Method, which I call Writing Like Software. Sure, laugh if you want at my "0.1 Alpha" version, but at some point, enough content will get to all the nodes that "You" (General User Base) will stop laughing and y'all will go "Oh. Right. I see now."
That's the future of writing. Elsewhere I have ranted about Print Live On Demand, the Future of Books. So sure, when an Author submits and update, the next copy of the book that gets Live Printed contains the new material.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Nice FP Sir, but this time it stumbles into a Colossal new topic.
It took way too long for the tech to Propogate, I'll give you that.
But the Future of Writing is Dynamic Hypertext.
Enough of these 1-shot Blogs with 8 pages on the same story. (Yay, Ad Views!)
The right way to do it is one page with 8 updates. Except Unskilled Users won't look if it's not fed to them via Rotator. Onward.
Hypertext Authoring means an Author can plan more than one story path. (Typically an ending.) With some work, there's some Footnotes too.
But even more powerful is that if the Author hates an entire section, he just re-writes it and re-submits it. With Print Live On Demand, no one cares, the Reader gets the Best Known Version. Only Novel Historians would know it was different.
Convinced Yet?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Okay, to play Cross Advocate to your nice post, I'll posit that Hypertext writing is more important than ever!
But first let's deal with terms. I'll use a (Shameless Plug) http://www.freevoteusa.com/ (/Shameless Plug) to illustrate. However badly, I got rid of most of the "Placeholder" signs, so there it is. Back to the point: You can Expand and Collapse the topics to your taste. At its best, that's what Hypertext Authoring does. X days (weeks if I get lazy) from now, I'll upload a new version with updates on all the nodes.
That's the future of Writing.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Bingo.
You consider " 'Literature' to be a narrative flow set out by the author", but it might be an Artifcact of the Publishing Process. The current problem is, the Media Companies don't want to deal with 6 different 10-page-endings.
Hypertext/Online, it's cake.
See my rants elsewhere for the Print Live On Demand angle.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I haven't yet busted Cracked's research in any of the ten-minute periods I look at their funny lists.
You can start with facts, then arrange them with Editorial. They have mastered that.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hello Sir.
I strongly dispute that much of literature could be written as 2-3 level Hypertext.
In particular, let's glance at Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. There's a novel that could have benefitted by putting 100 pages of it into Hypertext Footnotes!!
Modern Example: Lord of the Rings.Same Problem: Put the 23 page Species Histories into Hypertext.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hypertext was written by hyper people in hyperspace. They're all on Advil now.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
It still exists, people have just stopped calling it "Hypertext Literature". Checkout The SCP Foundation. Or read though any wiki at all on a Computer Game or IRL gaming experience.
Check this out:
http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/6408/reincarnations-the-awakening/index.html
This “game” is really a novel. The paths are pretty fixed, and it does nothing but tell a story a very long story. It took me about 15-20 hours of straight play to play/read it all it’s very engaging and feels and treats the story just like a bookwith pauses for solving puzzles that themselves help paint the story.
There’s a whole genre over at bigfishgames like this!! HUNDREDS of story gamesas they’re called. All for about $5.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
I think the idea of a work of fiction is to immerge you in a universe, an ambiance, a story, to make you forget you're actually reading or using any kind of media.
The best way todo this is probably not to rely heavily on hypertext which are constant reminders of the media.
It could make sense in a Tolstoï novel or a big work of SF where the universe is so complex and vast that you sometimes want to have a quick access to information relevent to the understanding . ( The silmarion and War and Peace are very hard at the beginning because every character has 3 different and unrelated names..., plus they generally have a lot of characters )
But even if it could enhance the understanding or at least make it more convenient it would still be damaging to the general experience.
Hypertext is great for quick access to a lot of related small pieces of information, but that's not what you want for a book. You want a deep experience of submerging yourself in a universe. It has to be even more immersive than a movie, and that's why it is so rewarding
Dickens is an interesting corner case. He wrote much of his work as serializations published monthly, a few dozen pages each month. The primary intent was probably financial but there were some very strong impacts on the art as well.
Financially, this was a very successful ploy as it allowed Dickens to write to the huge and under served market of common laborers who could not easily afford the price of a book, but could set aside a few pennies each month to buy the next installment. It was not uncommon in boarding houses, etc, for several persons to pool resources to make the purchases, with each installment handed down from one to the next. The approach made a lot of sense for the publishers as well, since the big up front costs of printing a run of books was avoided. So this was a tremendous marketing success, as big in its time as the first pocket MP3 players have been in our time. And perhaps the impetus for the "reading groups" we see today, where once everyone has read the next chapter, they all get together over cheap wine and pre-sliced cheese samplers to gossip about the characters.
But the impact on the art was also incredible. Dickens was getting feedback from his readers, and was clearly paying attention to it: minor characters that had struck a chord were given larger parts in later installments; some of the subplots were almost certainly proposed by readers. Dickens was perhaps the first to write an interactive novel.
He was also one of the first creative writers to run into the problem of deadlines. I don't think that anyone who has studied his works would disagree that he sometimes inserted fillers to round out his monthly quota. When he needed 2,000 words to properly handle the next plot twist but there was only room for 1,000 more words in the next installment, he would pad things out, sometimes with brilliantly detailed descriptions, sometimes the padding was not so brilliant, doing whatever it took to end up with an installment that ends properly with some kind of cliff-hanger. Some of that padding would definitely be better put in hypertext footnotes, or better yet, deleted entirely. But then you end up with a Readers Digest Condensed version, and not the real thing.
Even so, Dickens told his tales one word at a time, one sentence after the next, never side by each. There is never a time when he required the reader to absorb two different threads at once before going on to the next thing. Nor can you do that in literature-- the closest you can get is the use of flashbacks, etc, to loop the reader back through a sequence. But a tangled thread is still a linear thing.
Will