![]() In essence, he suggested that the hypertext reader partially constructs the narrative they experience by choosing which links to follow. Landow saw hypertext as a literal embodiment of the theories of post-structuralist literary critics such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The new form of hyperfiction acquired an early theorist in the person of George Landow, author of Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology ( 1992 1997 rev vt Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology 2006 rev vt Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization). The effect is of a Labyrinth of interconnected fragments representing the protagonist's disassociated state of mind, through which the reader wanders, experiencing moments first of frustration and then of epiphany. Different readings (or traversals) of the text can lead to radically different understandings of its meaning the narrator, who may have seen his son die on the afternoon of the story, may (or may not) have caused that death. It is often deliberately obscure, encouraging reader disorientation by such means as unexpected changes of the narrative voice and concealment of the links needed to move from one node to the next. This seminal work partakes enthusiastically of the postmodern tradition of literary experimentation. Storyspace, a software environment designed to enable the creation of hyperfiction (fiction written in hypertext), was first demonstrated in 1987, running Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a story. ![]() The main subject of this entry, however, is not hypertext in general, but its uses in fiction, and especially in science fiction. The concept then spread through the computer science community, becoming widely known with the release of the HyperCard application for the Apple Macintosh personal computer in 1987 and the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989-1991. ![]() Computerized systems which supported links between documents, loosely inspired by the memex, were demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart and Theodor Nelson in the US in 1968 Nelson is responsible for coining the actual word "hypertext". The clearest ancestor of modern hypertext, however, is the "memex" proposed by Vannevar Bush in "As We May Think" (July 1945 Atlantic Monthly), which would have allowed users to create "trails" of connected sets of microfilm pages, effectively constructing their own personal links around a set of immutable texts. The idea of somehow automating the retrieval of information from a common store appears repeatedly in the writings of the early twentieth century, as in the Permanent World Encyclopedia suggested by H G Wells in World Brain ( 1938). It is generally assumed that this scheme is implemented on a computer system this encyclopedia is itself an example of hypertext. Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, produced on Eastgate's Storyspace platform and published by the company in 1995 regarded by critics as an important work of hypertext and cyberfeminismĤ.Hypertext can be defined as a way of organizing textual information which allows users to move from one section, or node, to another along various routes, or links. as a box containing artifacts from the literary estate of the titular Uncle Buddyģ. John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, a hypermedia novel created in Hypercard 2.0 and published in 1993 by Eastgate System, Inc. Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger, programmed in BASIC as a serial novel and published on the net from 1986-1987 sold from 1987-1988 in various versions on 5 ¼ floppy disks through Art Com Catalog published in 1995 on the webĢ. They are also literary works in danger of becoming inaccessible to the public because they were produced on and for computer platforms that today are obsolete.ġ. and, because of their availability through commercial distribution, were influential in shaping literary theory and criticism that, today, are used to discuss born digital writing. They were also among the first computer-based works of literature to be sold commercially in the U.S. These literary works were produced with programming languages like BASIC or authoring systems like Storyspace and HyperCard and require a degree of interactivity between the reader and the work. ![]() Pathfinders begins the necessary process of documenting early digital literature, specifically pre-web hypertext fiction and poetry, from 1986-1995. ![]()
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