Hypertext...

1. In "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art", Landow and Delany suggest that “hypertext can be expected to have important institutional as well as intellectual effects, for it is at the same time a form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, a mode of publication, and a resource for collaborative work… Hypertext historicizes many of our most commonplace assumptions, forcing them to descend from the ethereality of abstraction and appear as corollary to a particular technology and historical era. We can be sure that a new era of computerized textuality has begun; but what it will be like we are just beginning to imagine."

This passage was written in 1991, at a time when hypertext systems were available in somewhat limited forms such as Hypercard and Intermedia, use of the Internet was largely confined to academic institutions, and the term “World Wide Web” had only just been coined. Now, 15 years later, comment and reflect upon the impact hypertext has had on the world.

The most apparent aspect that hypertext has impacted the world, I believe, is in the lifestyles of the people, especially in developed countries. People nowadays depend much more on the internet - hypertext news, hypertext information, hypertext searching, and hypertext communications. People no longer have the need to watch television or read the newspapers to get the latest news, but in fact may get it faster from the internet. People communicate through the internet and post their thoughts on blogs. Also, in terms of information gathering, users are flooded with a mass of information which may or may not be relevant. In the past, without the use of hypertext, people could not obtain information from numerous sources so easily. It was just the opposite, they had to search through libraries, catalogs, etc, and even if the obtained the right book, there was still the task of finding the relevant passage. Now, these processes have been cut down to simply searching on google. However, the flipside is of course, the overload of irrelevant information and that one has to now search through all the seemingly relevant information. Anyway, besides all these, hypertext has changed the way that things are presented to people. Consequently, "normal" text now has less appeal and may even be deemed outdated.

Image/text sequences

Man these images are hard to load!!

1. In his paper “Modular Structure and Image/Text Sequences: Comics and Interactive Media”, George Legrady states: “Meaning in the interactive work is a result of the sequential selection of components that the viewer assembles in the viewing process. The viewer can then be considered as someone who actively constructs the narrative through the assembling of fragmented or modular information elements. The sequential sum of viewed selections becomes the narrative.” This approach to interactivity is reflected in his work Slippery Traces. Discuss how this approach to constructing a narrative changes the roles of the reader and the author in the process of narrative transmission.

Interestingly, the narrative is not fixed at all in Legrady's work. Traditionally, narratives used to be set by the author and discovered by the reader as he/she read through the book or watched the movie, for example. Even games did not veer too far off from this model or method of discourse, although perhaps a number of different narratives were available to be "unlocked". This work, instead, throws off the traditionally accepted model. It replaces words with pictures, lets the reader "choose" the next possible image, and finally and most importantly, does not give any "orthodox" interpretation (like the story's supposed to be so and so..) of the resulting series of images. As a result, the usually passive user would have to first make choices as to where to click on the image. Following that would be the surprise at the next image and the wondering what is the link between the images. Finally, when the series is complete, there is a need to interpret the overall meaning of the images, and this is left entirely to the user's imagination. Likewise, the author, instead of writing a linear narrative or thinking of a story in his mind, now simply arranges sets of images in a database with different linkages between them. Thus, the author does not know the final product of the narrative that forms in the user's mind, and the user has no idea whether what the author intended the narrative to be corresponds to the one in his mind.

2. Choose a set of 5-10 images that you feel form a narrative. If they are not digital images, scan them into the computer (there’s a scanner available in the USP multimedia lab). Arrange them in a linear sequence on your blog. You may or may not want to include text captions with each image.Bring a physical copy of your images to class on Thursday. We’ll be using them as part of an in-class exercise.




3. Write about the narrative that your group has chosen for project 1. Why have you chosen this work? How might you approach the task of re-configuring it as an interactive piece? Be prepared to discuss your group’s choice of work in class on Thursday.