A presentation based on the Open the Space Guide produced by the Trace Online Writing Centre in 2002-2003, with many adaptations, additions and changes.

1. What is hypertext?

New Media Writing began as hypertext, which in turn began as a concept for the organisation of information.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush published an article entitled As We May Think in which he called for scientists to find new ways to store, process and access the massive amounts of knowledge available and constantly growing in the world. Libraries and their traditional methods of indexing and classification are no good for the navigation of such large data stores, he said, because they are not sufficiently intuitive: “The human mind operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain…”. (as quoted in http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/transition/guide/origins.htm accessed 25/11/2006)

The concept was further developed twenty years later when American programmer and designer Ted Nelson invented a system called Xanadu because he realised that: “We need a way for people to store information not as individual “files” but as a connected literature.” (as quoted in http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/transition/guide/origins.htm accessed 25/11/2006)

Nelson coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia:

“Hypertext was ‘nonsequential’ text, in which a reader was not constrained to read in any particular order, but could follow links and delve into the original document from a short quotation. Ted described a futuristic project, Xanadu, in which all the world’s information could be published in hypertext. (…) He had the dream of a utopian society in which all information would be shared among people who communicated as equals.”
[Berners-Lee, Tim Weaving the Web: the Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web London and New York: Texere Publishing Ltd., 2000 (1st published: London: Orion Business, 1999), pp. 5-6]

In 1991 (26 years later) at Cern, in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee developed the first global hypertext: the World Wide Web.

“The fundamental principle behind the Web was that once someone somewhere made available a document, database, graphic, sound, video or screen at some stage in an interactive dialogue, it should be accessible (subject to authorisation, of course) by anyone, with any type of computer, in any country. And it should be possible to make a reference -a link- to that thing, so that others could find it. This was a philosophical change from the approach of previous computer systems. (…) Getting people to put data on the Web often was a question of getting them to change perspective, from thinking of the user’s access to it not as interaction with, say, an online library system, but as navigation through a set of virtual pages in some abstract space.” (Ibid, p. 40)

“When I proposed the Web in 1989, the driving force I had in mind was communication through shared knowledge, and the driving ‘market’ for it was collaboration among people at work and at home. By building a hypertext Web, groups of people of whatever size could easily express themselves, quickly acquire and convey knowledge, overcome misunderstandings and reduce duplication of effort. This would give people in a group a new power to build something together.” (Ibid, p. 174-174)

Today we talk about the Web 2.0, a second generation of Internet-based services –such as social networking sites, wikis, and communication tools– that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users (Wikipedia, accessed 26/11/2006), and we continue to apply technology to art to make new meanings and to connect with each other.

2. Interactive storytelling

In recent years new forms of media writing have emerged, along with many different terms used to describe these: digital fiction; hypermedia; flash poetry; electronic literature; hypertexts; multi-media texts; web-based narratives . . . the list is long.

New media writing, being an emergent genre, does not even quite recognize itself yet. New media writers use different terms to refer to their work and to themselves. This is not unlike the broader debate about the terms and practices of new media art or media art or digital art or electronic art or art and new technologies….

Nevertheless, all new media writings have a least one thing in common: they must be viewed through the medium of an electronic display, usually a screen but sometimes just audio, via a computer, a PDA, mobile phone, data projector, or other. Their uniting characteristic is that the computer is an essential and inherent component of the writing, and without it the work would not exist.

Another common feature of much new media writing is the use of hypertext, which structures information in such a way that related items are connected, or threaded, together by links called hyperlinks. The items so linked may be text, but increasingly include other media, such as graphics, sound, animation or video. In this way hypertext becomes hypermedia.

Janet H. Murray, in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck talks about authorship in a new media context as ‘procedural’, which means that the author writes not only the text, but also the rules by which the text appears, that is, the rules for the readers/interactor’s involvement. I would add that, within such a context, the writer sometimes does not write the text at all. Instead, s/he creates the conditions for the interactors to produce the text themselves, and sets the context and rules for what can be produced and how. According to Murray: “The procedural author creates not just a set of scenes but a world of narrative possibilities.” (Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997, p. 153)

Another term Murray uses to describe the structure on new media writings is “kaleidoscopic”. This means that the structure allows for many actions to take place simultaneously, in multiple ways. (See ibid)

Finally, another element that Murray identifies as important for new media writing is the potential of enactment: the computer does not describe characters, like printed text does, nor does it observe them, like moving image does; instead, the computer “embodies and executes them” (ibid, p. 181), thus allowing us to explore this process of becoming. At the same time, the reader/interactor not only reads/ witnesses the story but, in some cases, s/he becomes its very protagonist.

3. Books vs. Electronic Media

According to the Trace guide, books have had several centuries to evolve and we have had all these centuries to become very sophisticated book-readers. We no longer ‘see’ the technology involved in book production, whereas we do ‘see’ the technology involved in the production of a hyper-novel or other piece of media writing.

When you see the physical object of a book, you know what to expect of this book from its very looks: its cover, the images and colours used, the type-face, the publishing company, along with the title and the name of the author, all convey information about what you should expect. In a glance you can judge if this is ‘serious’ fiction, a ‘thriller’, or an academic book.

In the same way, when reading a book you can easily assess where you are in the text overall. You know when you’ve just begun, you know when you’re half-way through, and you know how long it will take you to finish it.

We often think of interactive story-telling as something that can only happen on the web or through the use of a hypertext. This is not the case. Some examples of interactive pre-web literature books are:
– Jorge Luis Borges (1941) The Garden of Forking Paths, Labyrinths
– Milorad Pavic (1988) Dictionary of the Khazars

These conventions most often don’t apply to new media writing. This can make the life of a non-experienced new media reader fairly complicated to start with. For example, often there is no way of determining how large or complex a piece of writing is before you actually start navigating your way through it, so authors often provide tools such as help-files or site-maps to guide the reader. Once you begin to navigate through the text, the level of complexity becomes clear, but there is still no obvious way of assessing the length of a piece. In many cases this question does not even have an answer as, often, a hypertext is as ‘long’ as you want to make it. Length quickly becomes irrelevant because new media works often do not reach an ending or resolution in any conventional sense. Some narratives end by taking the reader back to the beginning; others do not end at all, but rely on the reader to find a sense of completion through exploring all the links via their own self-created pathways through the work.

New media writing relies on reader input to a far greater extent than print fiction. This is not true of all works –with some new media pieces the only ‘input’ the reader has is the electronic equivalent of turning pages, clicking the mouse to move forward or to begin an animation /film. Other pieces offer myriad alternate routes for the reader, whereas some depend on the community of their readers for their very existence (e.g. Wikis).

The range of new media writing available now is vast. There is non-fiction, short fiction, novels, poetry, journalism and works that fuse several forms. There are pieces that use sound as well as moving images, pieces that require the reader to contribute to the text, literary games, collaborative works, and works-in-process that are constantly changing.

As a reader, you may be asked to contribute something of your own –a fragment of text, a sound, or a memory. You may be asked to provide your email address so that the characters can interact with you after you have stopped ‘reading’ the work. Indeed, the text you’re reading may be written by hundreds of other people, sometimes anonymously, sometimes named. Some times there is no text at all until you have helped create it.

Reading new media writing is all about exploring –exploring the web to see what’s out there, exploring the new technologies and how to use them, exploring new ways of reading, new ways of telling stories.

Short Bibliography:

Berners-Lee, Tim Weaving the Web: the Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web London and New York: Texere Publishing, 2000

Bush, Vannevar “As We May Think” in The Atlantic Monthly July 1945. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

Calvino, Italo Invisible Cities London: Harcourt, 1974

Calvino, Italo If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler London: Vintage, 1998

Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997

Pavic, Milorad Dictionary of the Khazars London: Penguin, 1989

Pavic, Milorad Last Love in Constantinople London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1998

Rieser, Martin and Zapp, Andrea (Eds) New Screen Media: Cinema / Art / Narrative London: BFI Publishing, 2002

Wardrp-Fruin, Noah and Harrigan, Pat (Eds) First Person: New Media as Sotyr, Performance and Game Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2004

Links for this presentation at:
http://del.icio.us/mariax/dnarratives