Reimagining Books: The Possiblities of Digital Literature
The book is equipped with a sophisticated, multifunctional navigational system. It typically includes a table of contents and an index, allowing readers to jump non-linearly to different sections based on their needs or interests. This feature enhances the user experience by making the search for information more efficient and tailored.
Furthermore, a book is verifiable. It contains a copyright page that lists the publisher, the place of publication, the publication year, and the author's name. This information not only helps in establishing the book’s authenticity but also in referencing and citing the work correctly in academic and professional environments.
Another vital characteristic of the book is its fixed nature. The content remains unchanged over time; the words you read today will be the same when the book is reopened years later. Although physical damage could occur through events like fires, floods, or natural decay, there is an inherent sense of permanence and durability to a book. Its primary function is to capture thoughts in print and preserve them across time.
But envision a book transformed, possessing different affordances and material properties. Imagine a book where each word could act as a hyperlink, connecting you to another part of the same book or even to external texts. Picture a book bound on a spool, allowing you to enter and exit at any point, creating a narrative with neither beginning nor end—a seamless loop of storytelling potential.
Consider the implications for a storyteller in such a scenario. What narrative possibilities would open up if every time you shelved the book, the words inside shifted and rearranged themselves? Would it remain the same book, or become something entirely new each time it was read? As a poet, how would you utilize a format where the words reorder themselves, offering new meanings and interpretations with each reading?
Imagine a book that interacts with you as soon as you open it, asking which direction you wish to explore before it begins to unveil its story. Think of it as less of a static text and more of a conversation, a novel that requires your input to progress.
Picture reading a poem where the words lift off the pages and swirl around the room, morphing into three-dimensional forms that change and reassemble before your eyes. Imagine a book so connected that when opened, it reveals threads linking it to every other book in your library, allowing you to draw elements from one text into another seamlessly.
What if this book could integrate with the world around it—reading the newspaper, adapting its content based on the time of day, the weather, or the season? Envision opening your book to find comments left by friends who are reading it at the same time, or discovering that they are contributing to the book's content in real-time.
Imagine the book as a dynamic network: always on, always connected, always evolving. Reflect on the potential roles you could assume as a reader and a writer within this network. Imagine the book redefined as a networked computer, continuously updating and interacting with its environment and its readers.
People have long imagined transforming the traditional book into something far more dynamic, both before and after the advent of computers and the Internet. The fundamental shift that occurred with the digital revolution is that the once theoretical possibilities imagined for books are now within reach, thanks to the capabilities afforded by digital technology. We now have the tools to actualize these imaginative concepts, to turn them from mere ideas into tangible, interactive experiences.
We must explore how to use these digital affordances to create new forms of literature, to tell stories in innovative ways that were previously impossible. The key to unlocking these new possibilities lies in experimentation.
The field of electronic literature is dedicated to this pursuit. It involves continuous experimentation with the form and function of text as influenced by digital technology. Scholars and creators in the field are constantly pushing the boundaries, testing how text-based digital works can engage with readers in novel ways. Through such experimentation, they seek to discover how narrative structures can be reimagined, how poetry can transcend the page and become a multidimensional experience, and how stories can become more interactive and responsive to the reader's input.
In 2004, the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) formed a committee led by Noah Wardrip-Fruin to define the core literary practices that the organization focuses on. The outcome was a statement highlighting the forms of electronic literature, or e-lit, which refers to works that embody significant literary qualities and utilize the capabilities and contexts of standalone or networked computers. The identified categories within electronic literature include:
- Hypertext fiction and poetry, accessible both on and offline.
- Kinetic poetry using platforms like Flash.
- Computer art installations that incorporate literary elements or require reading.
- Conversational characters, also known as chatterbots.
- Interactive fiction.
- Literary applications.
- Novels presented in the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs.
- Poems and stories generated by computers, either interactively or based on preset parameters.
- Collaborative writing projects that invite reader participation in the text.
- Online literary performances that explore new forms of writing.
Hypertext fiction emerged as the earliest form of electronic literature to attract sustained critical attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s. As personal computers and the Internet gained widespread adoption, a dedicated cadre of writers started crafting stories as interlinked text fragments. These stories offered multiple potential reading paths, navigated through the reader’s choice of links between text segments.
More than just a style of writing, hypertext fundamentally operates as a text technology and a method for organizing, structuring, and disseminating information. Anyone who has used a web browser has engaged with hypertext: the "H" in HTML stands for Hypertext (HyperText Markup Language), and it is also present in the "http://" that precedes every web address. Every interaction with the network—linking and browsing the Web, and following connections between documents—employs hypertext. This technology has become so ingrained and intuitive that its presence is nearly invisible to most users, much like the technology behind books. Yet, it's worth recalling that as recently as the late 1990s, the concept of "following a link" in a text was still a novel idea.
During the 1980s and 1990s, before the advent of the World Wide Web, various hypertext systems were developed, many specifically geared towards writing. One significant innovation was Apple's introduction of HyperCard with the first Macintosh. HyperCard was not just a simple program; it fundamentally changed user interaction by utilizing hypertext and basic programming to allow users to create their own applications for personalized purposes. Designed around the index card metaphor, HyperCard let users build stacks of hypercards featuring programmable behaviors and links, and incorporate simple imagery and multimedia. This program enabled writers to craft some of the earliest forms of hypertext fiction and poetry, including the initial version of Deena Larsen’s "Marble Springs" in 1993.
While various platforms supported hypertext fiction, the Storyspace system, developed by Jay David Bolter, John B. Brown, and Michael Joyce and released in 1987, was particularly crucial for this genre as it was tailored specifically for writing. Storyspace helped shape hypertext fiction, a genre marked by its complex linking structures, as seen in seminal works like Michael Joyce's "afternoon: a story", Stuart Moulthrop's "Victory Garden", and Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl". These works, all written in Storyspace, epitomized what became known as the "Storyspace school."
Initially distributed as standalone works on disks and later on CDs for Macintosh or PC, and more recently in cross-platform formats, Storyspace publications were pivotal to the early evolution of electronic literature. Readers with even a basic understanding of the field often associate these early works with the defining characteristics of hypertext fiction.
Storyspace became particularly significant in the early history of hypertext fiction when Mark Bernstein and Eastgate Systems assumed its development and distribution, incorporating it into a publishing enterprise. Eastgate, modeled after a traditional small press, distributed its literary products on digital storage media—initially on floppy disks, then CD-ROMs, and currently USB sticks. This strategy provided a familiar publishing platform for authors and offered a means to distribute hypertext fiction to a broader audience before widespread Internet access was common. Eastgate's select but influential collection of works garnered much of the early critical attention in electronic literature.
Meanwhile, the development of the most important contemporary hypertext system, the World Wide Web, began modestly. While working at CERN in the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee was motivated by the common problem of interoperability among different file formats and the difficulty in accessing documents cited in research. He envisioned a system where researchers, especially those in fast-paced fields like physics, could easily access citations without needing extensive library resources. Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext markup language standard in his 1989 white paper, “Information Management: A Proposal.” By 1991, he had set up the first World Wide Web server.
Initially, the hypertext research community was lukewarm towards Berners-Lee’s proposal, noting its simplicity compared to existing systems. The Web had minimal features; its links were unidirectional and offered limited programmability. However, this simplicity proved advantageous as it required minimal training to create HTML documents, facilitating rapid adoption. Unlike many hypertext platforms, HTML was non-proprietary, designed not for corporate profit but to enable researchers—and eventually the general public—to share and link documents easily on a global network. Crucially, HTML was designed to be extensible, supporting simple text formatting and image embedding while allowing for additional scripting languages and extensions.
The first web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was launched in 1994 by the National Supercomputing Agency at the University of Illinois. It soon evolved into the commercially popular Netscape Navigator, and web browsers quickly became a standard feature on personal computers globally. This ushered in the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web, bringing hypertext to a mass audience for the first time. While other platforms like Twine have emerged, specifically catering to creative writing, HTML on the World Wide Web remains the predominant hypertext platform today, testament to its enduring impact and accessibility.
As the World Wide Web evolved, it brought new authoring programs and methods of dissemination. Storyspace, once a premier Web authoring tool for electronic literature, now faces significant limitations such as a restricted color palette and inability to handle sound files for web playback. While Storyspace continues to produce compelling new works, it has been surpassed by more versatile tools in electronic literature authoring.
The proliferation of web-based hypertexts and hypermedia began in earnest in the mid-to-late 1990s, driven by the advent of graphical browsers and multimedia editors like Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash. Even though first-generation hypertexts—published before this shift and described by Hayles (2002)—incorporated graphical or color elements, the capabilities were limited. A notable number of works featured in the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (EQRH) during the early days of what is now known as Web 1.0 included pixel graphics and preliminary color elements.
With the transition to the Web, the nature of electronic literature also transformed. Early works, typically blocks of text known as "lexia" with limited graphics, evolved into richer, multimodal compositions. While initial works focused on the hypertext link as their defining feature, later works employed a variety of navigation schemes and interface metaphors that often deemphasized the traditional link.
As electronic literature diversified, hypertext fictions evolved into hybrid forms. Examples include M.D. Coverley's "Califa," a narrative drawn from data repositories; the picaresque "The Unknown" by Dir Stratton, Scott Rettberg, and William Gillespie, with an aesthetic echoing Kerouac's "On the Road"; and Michael Joyce's elegantly orchestrated Storyspace work "Twelve Blue," available via the Eastgate Hypertext Reading Room. Caitlin Fisher's "These Waves of Girls" incorporates sound, spoken text, animated text, graphics, and networked linking structures. Stuart Moulthrop's "Reagan Library" integrates QuickTime movies with random text generation, while Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley's "The Jew's Daughter" features a novel interface that updates text passages on mouse-over. Talan Memmott's "Lexia to Perplexia" and Richard Holeton's parodic "Frequently Asked Questions about Hypertext," which evolves a narrative from annotations to a poem in a Nabokovian style, are other notable examples.
To encapsulate these and similar works, David Ciccoricco coined the term "network fiction," defining it as digital fiction that uses hypertext technology to create emergent and recombinatory narratives.
Conclusion
Over the past decade, electronic literature has evolved into a fully institutionalized discipline, drawing hundreds of scholars, artists, writers, curators, and media developers from around the globe. These professionals gather annually at conferences and contribute to multinational, government-funded archives and databases such as CELL, ELD, and ELMCIP. Additionally, they engage with open-access scholarly journals like the Electronic Book Review and The Digital Review, further enriching the field's academic resources.
As a highly collaborative and multimodal trans-discipline, electronic literature encompasses various aspects of comparative literature. It is inherently multinational and multilingual, spanning multiple and cross-platform methodologies, and it bridges pre-digital and post-digital approaches while also embracing multimodality. Typically, works of electronic literature are multiauthored, exemplifying the expansive nature of world literature.
In more recent developments, influenced by movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Electronic Literature Organization has shifted its focus from predominantly formalist concerns to more politicized agendas. For instance, introducing bespoke fellowships to "augment anti-racism" marks a significant move towards addressing social issues through electronic literature. This evolution shows that despite the term 'literature' sometimes seeming controversial or outdated, its application within electronic literature underscores the field's commitment to radical cultural, semiotic, and technological inclusivity. This inclusivity is coupled with a readiness for continuous innovation, challenging normativity, and undergoing transformation.
Thus, in the realm of electronic literature, the concept of 'literature' is not only formally malleable but also politically progressive, reflecting a global and inclusive approach. This makes electronic literature a dynamic and transformative field that continues to redefine the boundaries and possibilities of literary practice.
Comments
Post a Comment