authoring software

Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment, has been widely used for writing, reading, and research for nearly fifteen years. The appearance of a new implementation provides a suitable occasion to review the design of Storyspace, both in its historical context and in the context of contemporary research. Of particular interest is the opportunity to examine its use in a variety of published documents, all created within one system, but spanning the most of the history of literary hypertext.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This paper is interesting for the technical background it provides on many often-analysed works of electronic literature.

Card Shark and Thespis are two newly-implemented hypertext systems for creating hypertext narrative. Both systems depart dramatically from the tools currently popular for writing hypertext fiction, and these departures may help distinguish between the intrinsic nature of hypertext and the tendencies of particular software tools and formalisms. The implementation of these systems raises interesting questions about assumptions underlying recent discussion of immersive, interactive fictions, and suggests new opportunities for hypertext research.

This article traces the history of Storyspace, the world’s first program for creating, editing and reading hypertext fiction. Storyspace is crucial to the history of hypertext as well as the history of interactive fiction. It argues that Storyspace was built around a topographic metaphor and that it attempts to model human associative memory. The article is based on interviews with key hypertext pioneers as well as documents created at the time.

This interview appeared alongside three works by Jason Nelson in Cordite's Electronica issue, giving insight into Nelson's creative practices and digital poetry.

The creativity support community has a long history of providing valuable tools to artists and designers. Similarly, creative digital media practice has proven a valuable pedagogical strategy for teaching core computational ideas. Neither strain of research has focused on the domain of literary art however, instead targeting visual, and aural media almost exclusively. To address this situation, this thesis presents a software toolkit created specifically to support creativity in computational literature. Two primary hypotheses direct the bulk of the research presented: first, that it is possible to implement effective creativity support tools for literary art given current resource constraints; and second, that such tools, in addition to facilitating new forms of literary creativity, provide unique opportunities for computer science education. Designed both for practicing artists and for pedagogy, the research presented directly addresses impediments to participation in the field for a diverse range of users and provides an end-to-end solution for courses attempting to engage the creative faculties of computer science students, and to introduce a wider demographic—from writers, to digital artists, to media and literary theorists—to procedural literacy and computational thinking. The tools and strategies presented have been implemented, deployed, and iteratively refined in real-world contexts over the past three years. In addition to their use in large-scale projects by contemporary artists, they have provided effective support for multiple iterations of ‘Programming for Digital Art & Literature’, a successful inter-disciplinary computer science course taught by the author. Taken together, this thesis provides a novel set of tools for a new domain, and demonstrates their real-world efficacy in providing both creativity and pedagogical support for a diverse and emerging population of users.

For several years, the Paragraph Laboratory, University of Paris 8, has explored new avenues in the field of digital art and literature. In that context, a project is currently ongoing in this lab, in collaboration with the University of Technology of Compiegne and the University of Geneva, supported by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris Nord. The goal of this project is to design a computer tool for the writing of nonlinear fictions for interactive media and to investigate its impact on both the writing and reading processes.

This experimental tool is based on a dynamic link engine, managed by structural entities named hypersections. A hypersection is a recursive container: it can include not only framents, to be directly accessed by the reader, but also hypersections. Simple rules for sequencing/interweaving hierarchical hypersections allow for very variable potential reading trajectories, while limiting the complexity of writing that is observed in classical hypertextual approaches. The tool is developed in Java with Eclipse. It currently contains some writing and reading features such as the folding/unfolding of the structure, the zooming or the color coding. The tool is developed in collaboration with authors and readers. This design methodology aims at experimenting several alternative interfaces.

The tool is now composed of three modules: the writing module, the structure visualisation module and the reading module (itself composed of a fragment reading interface and an inter-fragment navigation interface). The structure visualisation module, initially designed for monitoring and feedback purpose for the author quickly appeared as a relevant module, on the reader’s side. Indeed, it stages the reading process in a unique and innovative manner. The reader is able to combine the reading of the text and the reading of the device. He or she can enjoy the discovery of sophisticated mechanics for reading management. The reader can also realise that some unread fragments are still to be discovered. More generally the reader realises that other trajectories are possible and can enjoy the re-reading of the piece.

Does this new approach present a risk of a displacement of the reader’s interest in favor of the device, at the expense of the litterature quality itself? We hypothesise that the reading of the device is fully part of the reading pleasure. The proposed tool opens new perspectives to computer-based litterary creation, since it opens a certain form of procedural writing to non computer expert authors. In particular, the visualisation of the structure for the reader provides the author with the opportunity to invent new discursive strategies.

(Source: Author-submitted abstract.)