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New Plots for Hypertext?: Towards a Poetics of the Hypertext Node
While the significance of hypertext links for the new ways of telling stories has been widely discussed, there has been not many debates about the very elements that are being connected: hypertext nodes. Apart from few exceptions, poetics of the link overshadows poetics of the node. My goal is to re-focus on a single node, or lexia, by introducing the concept of contextual regulation as the major force that shapes hypertext narrative units. Because many lexias must be capable of occurring in different contexts and at different stages of the unfolding story, several compromises have to be made on the level of language, style, plot and discourse. Each node, depending on its position and importance, has a varying level of connectivity and autonomy, which affects the global coherence of text.
Scott Rettberg - 26.05.2013 - 14:25
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Towards a Poetics of Multi-Channel Storytelling
In 2001 Henry Jenkins discussed the growing prevalence of ‘transmedia storytelling’. Transmedia storytelling is, simply put, franchises: a movie is followed by a game, then perhaps a comic, website and so on. An example is the Wachowski brother’s Matrix franchise. For Jenkins each media, each channel, communicates different aspects of a storyworld. Since 2003 Jane McGonigal, and others, have been researching the phenomenological and social aspects of ‘alternate reality gaming’. Alternate reality gaming requires players to traverse websites, games, public play, SMS and so on. Microsoft’s The Beast was the first of such ‘games’ that required participation with websites, posters, faxes, hacking, chatbots and Spielberg’s film AI (McGonigal, 2003).
Academic research into multi-channel storytelling is at present approached from the media studies and phenomenological perspective. As yet no poetics to address transmedia, alternate reality gaming, cross- or multi-platform and cross-media of content have been proposed in academia; in addition no poetics has been invented for multi- channel single-story creation (that is: one story told over multiple media).Jill Walker Rettberg - 12.06.2013 - 15:10
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Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate
This is the paper where Ted Nelson first coined the word hypertext. What follows is the abstract he wrote for the paper:
Jill Walker Rettberg - 27.06.2013 - 12:49
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Storyspace 1
Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment, has been widely used for writing, reading, and research for nearly fifteen years. The appearance of a new implementation provides a suitable occasion to review the design of Storyspace, both in its historical context and in the context of contemporary research. Of particular interest is the opportunity to examine its use in a variety of published documents, all created within one system, but spanning the most of the history of literary hypertext.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This paper is interesting for the technical background it provides on many often-analysed works of electronic literature.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 28.06.2013 - 14:49
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The Structure of Hypertext Activity
A framework for discussion of hypertext activity is introduced using the concepts acteme, episode, and session. Acteme is a low-level unit such as link-following; episode is a collection of actemes that cohere in the reader's mind; session is the entirety of contiguous activity. Well-known issues in hypertext rhetoric are recast in this framework and generalized to all varieties of acteme. We consider whether the episode is a virtual document, user interface issues pertaining to the episode, multi-episode structure, concurrency issues, and reader-as-writer activity, with a frequent emphasis on hypertext gathering.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 28.06.2013 - 21:30
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The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ
The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ
Scott Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 10:47
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Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny
Bush considered the plight of a researcher deluged with inaccessible information. He proposed the MEMEX, a machine to rapidly access, and allow random links between, pieces of information. Networks and computers have since allowed us to exceed even that far-sighted vision in terms of speed and convenience. However, we have not seen dramatic advances in our ability to solve political problems, to manage large organizations, or to magnify our group intuition.
We must do more than empower the individual. We must allow people and machines interacting together to behave in new ways as a mass. Now that we can make trails though our information, we must create a substrate in which these trails will grow into an increasingly meaningful whole, rather than a tangled mass. We and our documents are capable of operating together as a large machine but not as a large mind. Groups of all sizes must acquire gifts of intuition, correlation and invention which we associate normally with people rather than machines, before we can rise to Bush's challenge to mankind to "grow in the wisdom of race experience", rather than "perish in conflict".
(Source: Author's abstract)
Scott Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 11:00
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Relationally Encoded Links and the Rhetoric of Hypertext
Landow examines the rhetoric of linking in hypertext documents based on his experience with the Context32: A Web of English Literature system and argues for principles of relational logic in linking.
Scott Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 11:28
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Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Ontological Design for Virtual Spaces
Hypermedia designers have tried to move beyond the directed graph concept, which defines hypermedia structures as aggregations of nodes and links. A substantial body of work attempts to describe hypertexts in terms of extended or global spaces. According to this approach, nodes and links acquire meaning in relation to the space in which they are deployed. Some theory of space thus becomes essential for any advance in hypermedia design; but the type of space implied by electronic information systems, from hyperdocuments to “consensual hallucinations,” requires careful analysis. Familiar metaphors drawn from physics, architecture, and everyday experience have only limited descriptive or explanatory value for this type of space. As theorists of virtual reality point out, new information systems demand an internal rather than an external perspective.
Scott Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 11:55
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Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word
This essay discusses the visual characteristics of hypertext (space, contour, depth) by situating it, as an artistic form, in the literary traditions that it extends and modifies. While, from a literary perspective, hypertextuality is nothing new, what is revolutionary is the way that computerized hypertext emulates the spatial and visual qualities that literary texts have historically struggled to effect. To illustrate the concept of spatial form I have chosen to analyze the mola web, a hypertext which is unique, though not abnormal, in the extremity of its link structure. One needs only think of the ubiquitous metaphor of the labyrinth in hypertext criticism or of the recent attention given to spatial user interfaces to see how dependent is the idea of hypertext on a spatial form.
Scott Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 14:21
