ccr 760: hypertext rhetorics

course resources

Hypertexts

Last year, for the first time, the Electronic Literature Organization offered two $10,000 prizes for the best work in hypertext/multimedia. Their site includes information on joining the organization, as well as the most comprehensive directory of web-accessible hypertexts available. [cgb]

Although most of their offerings are of the variety we're reading for class, there are some web-based hypertexts at the Eastgate Systems site. Check out their Reading Room. Mark Bernstein, the Eastgate tsar, also maintains a hypertext news site called the Hypertext Kitchen, where you can find job announcements, calls for papers, journal releases, etc. [cgb]

Hyperizons looks like a strong hyperfiction site gone to seed. It was created by Michael Shumate, a fiction writer and archivist at Duke's Special Collections Library, but he seems to have walked away in July 1997. What's there collecting dust, however, won several mid-'90s awards and is still worth a little grazing time: sections devoted to original fiction, converted/shovelware fiction, theory and criticism, reviews, bibliographies, and links. [Don]

For years, The Iowa Review Web has been one of my favorite stops for hypertext. Run by the editors of the popular print small-press journal, the Iowa Review Web offers new hypertexts on a regular basis as well as featured artist profiles. [cgvb ]

Defined as a "public domain narrative environment," the hypertextGrammatron was developed by Mark Amerika. This site doesn't seem to have changed much over the past year or two, but it gave me my earliest idea of what a hypertext was, and how one might work. [cgvb ]

The Victorian Web is a notable illustration of hypertext realized by George Landow himself. There is little visually interesting or aesthetically pleasing about it. Images are used sparingly and only as decoration or, occasionally, as illustration. Landow's design sense (both visual and information architecture), seen here and in his other works, is interesting in juxtaposition with what he says about hypertext. [gr]

Geoff Ryman's 253, an "interactive novel" about passengers on London Underground train. I'm reading it right now, so I'm not ready to say much else. [gr]

Though we can debate its hypertexuality, Project Bartleby offers a substantial collection of classic texts online. The collection itself, and the avialability of these texts makes it worth a look. [peb]

Robert Kendall, author of a book-length hypertext poem, A Life Set for Two (Eastgate Systems, 1996) teaches electronic poetry and fiction online via Stanford University. His Web site Word Circuits publishes hypertext literature and offers a host of literary resources as well as samples of current hypertexts and hypertexts in process. Many of the hypertexts I have browsed seem highly interactive and multimedia. [jjb]

About Hypertext

Most of their offerings are less than hypertextual themselves, but there are a number of useful essays about hypertext in the journal Kairos, particularly in their latest issue (6.2), which contains 7-8 papers from last year's Computers and Writing conference on the topic. [cgb]

The Electronic Labyrinth is a hypertext about hypertext, and provides a fairly useful introduction to many of the key figures and concepts relevant to hypertext theory and practice. [cgb]

Journalists as individuals and journalism as an institution generally have little patience for theory -- one reason I'm slowly extricating myself from the field. But hypertext is wreaking serious havoc in the industry, not only by influencing narrative styles and textuality, but also by threatening the economic foundation of the daily newspaper -- the sacrosanct classified ad. Online Journalism Review offers some of the best self-reflexive and nontechnical thinking about online news media and (among many topics) the means by which hypertext aids and abets interactivity, democratization, and customized information delivery. [Don}

Grammatron creator Mark Amerika has catologued his columns on hypertext, technology, and his experiences as a virtual artist at "Amerika Online." When I first came across this site, I especially appreciated seeing him make connections with some of my favorite fiction writers and poets, such as Jeff Noon and Allen Ginsberg. [cgvb ]

"The State of Hypertext," David Auerbach's scathing--and remarkably short--essay on the . . . well, you know . . . locates much of the shortcomings of current hypertexts in authors' lack of understanding of how computers actually work, "refus[ing] to do more than dip their toes in the technological waters." He has some not-very-nice things to say about Mark Amerika. [gr]

Hypertext and the Art of Memory is an article by Janine Wong and Peter Storkerson, published in Visible Language. I'm not sure what to make of this text, but it takes up issues that are important to me and does it in ways I wish Landow had. I also like the design of the site. After I have a chance to read it again, I may revise this significantly. [gr]

Hypertext Breakdown is a page constructed by Mindy McAdams as a continuation and extension of work done for her Master's in Media Studies. It consists of a series of links that think through the basic units of what she terms cybermedia. In the process she provides useful comparisons in terms of film and spacial metaphors. [jjb]

Design Resources

One of the most comprehensive collections of resources you're likely to find, the Web Developers' Virtual Library contains great authoring tutorials and links to all sorts of other resources, including graphics archives, software applications, design tips, et al. [cgb]

Without a question, my favorite designer is Zeldman. His site offers some free graphics, but more recently, he's devoted his efforts to maintaining A List Apart, a bi-weekly journal about digital design issues, and the Web Standards Project. He's also the author of one of the better web design texts out there, called Taking Your Talent to the Web. [cgb]

For my money, Webmonkey is one of the best web design resources (and virtual panic buttons) out there; its rotating feature-type format makes it a frequent stop for me, because it tells me how to do things I never even thought of trying. I consider it kind of like the "Home Depot" of web design. [cgvb ]

From style-sheets to java script to basic html, htmlgoodies offers one of the best sites for web developers. There are primers, tutorials, and multiple search engines to help the user find his/her way around. [peb]

For those just getting started with coding html and needing that step by step instruction, PageTutor offers simple and friendly tuturials as well as a searchable sitemap for those more advanced designers. [jjb]

Proto-Hypertext

The "content" of Robert Coover's early story "The Babysitter" is slight and willfully tawdry, but its multicursal print narrative anticipated, in uncanny ways, the anxiety of negotiating hypertext. If the fictions of Borges are the elegant site map to a hypertextual garden of forking paths, reading "The Babysitter" was more akin to actually thrashing through the shrubbery, lost and bleeding. "The Babysitter" -- and, to a degree, several other pieces in the print collection Pricksongs and Descants (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1969) -- recast reading conventions as sites of resistance and slowly, viscerally, broke them down. It was tough love for linear narrative. (By the way, if someone has a better name/frame for this category or simply wants to expand it, feel free to mess.) [Don]

Rhetorical and Historical Context

In The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), Richard A. Lanham is interested in what happens when print becomes malleable -- when the word is restored to its ancient iconographic status and design function while also retaining its place in conventional hard-type signification. Many many of his observations on hypertext itself are derived from Gregory Ulmer, Jay David Bolter, and George P. Landow; Lanham's strength is his ability to place the conversation about electronic discourse in a rhetorical and historical long view that provides a very different perspective from that of Landow. An excerpt from The Electronic Word is available online. [Don]

James J. O'Donnell examines what is hidden when we schematize systems of writing and documentation (including memory itself) into eras and dialectical frames -- "orality" and "literacy," "chirography" and "print," "page" and "screen," "determinacy" and "indeterminacy" -- the degree to which such technologies and concepts co-exist and interpenetrate one another. Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) manages to be both "personal" and "scholarly" -- another binary O'Donnell would discard. O'Donnell is a himself a fascinating hybrid, an Augustine/classical studies scholar who also oversees information systems and computing at Penn and has written extensively on Web-based pedagogy. His Augustine-centered Web site interweaves all these interests; it's worth the trip despite a design that takes the metaphor of the labyrinth far too literally.) [Don]

Nicholas Burbules and Thomas Callister's Knowledge at the Crossroads addresses many of the same issues and ideas as George Landow's Hypertext 2.0. Burbules and Callister's essay retains a multivoiced and nonlinear form while offering intriguing information about defining hypertext, comparing it to traditional texts, and hypertext's implcations in thought and knowledge. It also adresses some of the key terms of debate surrounding hypertext, including defintions of "text" and what it means to "read," as well as relations between "author" and "reader."[jjb]

Hayden White's case is that we construct all historical meaning through four rhetorical "master tropes" of narrative, and that while we can choose among and (to a degree) manipulate those narrative tropes, we cannot get outside them or the ideologies they embody. White doesn't address hypertext; his key work was done in the '70s and '80s. But his work is a useful resource in that it theorizes a wealth of narrative possibilities and thus counterbalances the reductionist tendency to define narrative strategies in print as merely "linear." "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" is a good introduction to White's thought. It's collected in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). An online excerpt awaits at the site for Critical Inquiry, which first published "The Value of Narrativity" in the same 1980 special issue that included Paul Ricoeur's "Narrative Time" and Barbara Herrnstein Smith's "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories." [Don]

In "Digital Diploma Mills:The Automation of Higher Education" David Noble "...argues that the trend towards automation of higher education as implemented in North American universities today is a battle between students and professors on one side, and university administrations and companies with 'educational products' to sell on the other." This is a useful piece for thinking about any technological innovation in higher ed. [peb]