In 2009 French writer Andrew Gallix argued in the Guardian that e-lit was “dead.” I responded to him in an article published in ebr that it was not and laid out the various pieces of evidence that ran counter to his argument. Of course since that time the ELO has published its second collections of elit. The MLA 2012 exhibit has taken place and another will occur again at MLA 2013. The ELO media art show is forthcoming in June in Morgantown, WV. The ground-breaking reading in December at The Kitchen in NYC has taken place. And a large national event featuring elit is in the works for next spring. What is interesting about these activities is that new author of elit are involved along with those who helped to establish the field. Obviously, elit is not dead. As curator of three upcoming exhibits, I can say that it is exciting to see all of the new writers of elit emerging from around the world.

So, in thinking about your question, “Is Hypertext dead?,” I have to say that if you consider that this technology you are using to publish your essay is built on, among many things, html, and that I can click on numerous of the hyper textual links to move around this blog and outside of it, then hypertext as a function is quite alive and very useful in expressing your views. Hypertext’s problem is its ubiquity. It is no longer a radically new technology but is the foundation of so much of what we do online. It has, in effect, become transparent, with all of the issues that transparency carries with it.

However, “fiction” and “novel” belie the artifact that we actually encounter in hypertextual contexts. We must now come to terms with emergent narrative, participatory “authorship,” and the ambiguity of the role of “reader” … or is that role “author” as we make choices of which word to click next? We are terribly uncomfortable with this new cultural role thrust upon us, we react to having to labour more in order to participate in the narrative. I daresay in the back of our minds, we are surprised at the intrusion into our traditional role of reader, and we writhe at the aesthetic ambiguity of ending a narrative when we decide to stop clicking links.
Afternoon and Patchwork Girl are exhilarating experiences of literary liberation but are perhaps best read within the dominant scribal environment in order to experience the liberation by contrast.

TheSalon article quoted here raises another interesting question about interface: “We now read on iPads and Kindles and Nooks. So why did the hypertext novel fail to launch?”

I know because I’ve tried it that it’s possible to put hyperlinks into books in both the Epub and MOBI formats, for use with all of those devices. But even so, most of the books for those devices “are basically doing what the page does”.

As for exploiting unique characteristics, I think that’s a big one too, and a changing one. It’s akin to that “photography moment” in the visual arts, where the painters began to find things like Impressionism and abstraction that were unique to the medium of paint, and photographers began to create moving pictures, for example. It can take a while for the things to move in their own separate directions.

Can hypertext do more than “sophisticated footnoting”?

Volume 2:
http://collection.eliterature.org/2/

And the Electronic Literature Database:
http://directory.eliterature.org/

Cheers.

As for fiction via hypertext, there seems to be small communities writing “Fighting Fantasy” type games still, both in paper hypertext form and WWW based.

But also, there are many “games” that are hypertexts. You could say they are more like hypertext graphic novels, but some of the best lack words entirely. For example, Machinarium and Tiny Bang Story. There are many more that do have words. In any case, the story changes depending on your actions as you play.

Machinarium is the best example of that. It *never* plays the same way twice, even in fairly small segments.

http://mith.umd.edu/mith-receives-mellon-funding-for-open-annotation-collaboration/

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 book…with pauses for solving puzzles that themselves help paint the story.

There’s a whole genre over at bigfishgames like this!! HUNDREDS of story games…as they’re called. All for about $5.

It is sad that hypertext was seen as the ultimate referencing tool when it was first conceived (in the 70′s), but the latest standard has no support for it.

Because they require some other web page (which you probably don’t control) to also be modified.

But, you say, there could be automatic back-links! Sure, and think of the uproar when your political/philosophical/religious enemy references a “hit piece” page which your web site auto-links to…

So, ain’t gonna happen in any fashion.

Anyway, that’s what the back arrow is for.

In fiction the author is creating a world and you, the reader, are being pulled along by the story.

Hypertext literature, as was dreamed of in the 1990s was more than alternative endings it included visuals (you’re reading, click to the next “page” and it’s black and a word comes slowly into focus, you click to a picture and then back to reading. This interferes with reading. You want to immersed in the story and this just doesn’t mesh.

However graphic novels will soon go digital and THEN we will see the beginning of hypertext stories. What will happen with this convergence of text and graphic/video I don’t know, but it will be fun.

… hyperlinks can be bidirectional: they can be followed in two directions, so both ends act as anchors and as targets. …The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones….
from somewhere in Wikipedia.

We need to distinguish between fiction and poetry on the one hand and non-fiction on the other.

I think there is probably more apparent potential in the non-fiction area for innovative use of hypertext. Glossaries could easily be linked to text. Back and forward references in the argument could be linked. Tables could perhaps be expanded and collapsed. Interactive graphs and charts could enhance the reader experience. Why we are not seeing more of this isn’t clear. Possibility the demands of writing for multiple distribution mechanisms including printing makes it impossible to translate the experience so the writing is done at the lowest common denominator.

With fiction, I think the problem is reader expectation of medium. People expect to read from start to finish. They have no interest in jumping around. As a matter of fact, jumping around would almost destroy the experience of the traditional novel.

Poetry has possibilities but it would need to be a sort of avant garde poetry. Once again, the traditional reader of poetry is attached to the flow of the words. If you jump around that is destroyed. And changing fonts doesn’t affect the underlying words. And beside e.e. cummings already did that so there is much left to do in that area anyway.

My own thoughts have gone along the lines of some of the works of John Cage and William Burroughs. I think they would be experimenting with hypertext if they were still around but once again they were in the avant garde style and the market for that stuff is really pretty small.

So we have a great technology but no real art form that can use it.

Maybe we need a new art form.

An idaa whose time has come, again?

It took 4 or 5 millenia from the beginning of written language to develop the literary novel. And there had been spoken language for a long time before that.

So, even though richer textual structures on top of written language, which we now call “hypertext,” probably constitute a less radical development than written language from spoken language, we might give them more than a few decades to compete.

By the time new textual structures have matured enough to support a stable literature, they will probably not be called “hypertext” any more, and may not resemble todays hypertext very closely.

Mike O’Donnell

Anyway, there’s a reason that linear stories *work*: we are linear creatures in a linear universe. (Hypertext works in Wikipedia, though, because we don’t have to finish the whole story/article before jumping off to something else.)

Other tracking software not mentioned is:

Power Tracker

The Working Writer

Both have demos available

Those are nice. Two nit-picks, though. What type of rule do these pages have? Also, it’s a shame that 100% recycled paper isn’t acid free, which generally means it isn’t archival. I don’t feel so bad about it being non-recycled paper if I’m pretty sure I’m never going to throw it out, but then again, posterity probably puts everything in the landfill sooner or later.

http://www.utrechtart.com/dsp_view_product.cfm?item=24117

http://www.ele-mental.org/~ecc/exo/exotica/outerspace/esquivel%20lp.jpg