hypertext fiction

This paper outlines public archives of electronic literature authoring tools and technologies via git version control as a platform for decentralized organization, with a specific focus on current and proposed future uses of the GitHub platforms. How are the source code and tooling for creating electronic literature maintained currently preserved through public open source, and how might ELO initiatives and community best practices engage with them in the future?Throughout its history electronic literature has been been widely varied and proliferated in many ways: varied in forms or artifacts that are experimental or avant-garde in themselves, varied in modes of distribution across various platforms (including popular and experimental forms), and varied in the authoring tools and techniques used to create it. This proliferation and continual engagement with the *now* of rapid technological change is by its nature usually attached to relatively ephemeral software and hardware forms, whether StorySpace, Flash, the Nintendo DS, et cetera. As most electronic literary works are therefor by default ephemera, a long-held core mission of electronic literature communities of practice has been the preservation, archiving, and dissemination of electronic literature works. A survey briefly considers the context of many existing initiatives to catalog and archive such works -- in particular, the examples of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (https://elmcip.net/), the CELL Search Engine (https://cellproject.net/), and IFDB: the Interactive Fiction Database (https://ifdb.tads.org/). As the CELL project describes it: "To the degree that inclusion in a database is now the publishing event and the life of a literary work is defined through a trail of linked commentaries and active responses, the gathering and identification of works becomes itself a creative and scholarly activity." Currently these database catalogs tend to be primarily artifact-centric -- focused primarily on preserving a "work" -- rather than tool-centric or platform-centric, focused on preserving a practice, craft, or creative mode.By contrast, several electronic literature authoring communities of practice are organized around particular genres or platforms -- for example, hypertext authors using Twine, IF authors using Inform, or bot authors using Tracery -- make extensive use of open source repositories and hosts such as GitHub in order to develop and disseminate authoring tools, platforms, libraries, and plugins et cetera for electronic literature authoring. These tend to be decentralized, supported by small numbers of self-hosting developers who are addressing to specific active communities of practice in their own terms. One practical consequence of this is tagging: umbrella terms such as "electronic literature" or "elit" are almost unknown in GitHub repository tags.The paper concludes by putting forward a model for a public open source archive for electronic literature tool and platform source code, based on cataloging and mirroring a collection of forks of existing code bases drawn from across multiple electronic literature authoring communities. It is modeled on a related project in the area of creative computing, the Archive for Processing initiative (https://github.com/archive-for-processing/archive-for-processing).

Join us for a fast paced, fascinating romp through some of Africa's electronic literature. Digitally born from so many different countries and languages, African elit spans interactive video games(pc, mobile and web), Twitterature, interactive poetry, hypertext fiction etc. Yohanna Waliya Jospeh, at the University of Calabar in Nigeria, is a digital poet, distant writer, novelist, playwright, winner of the Janusz Korczak Prize for Global South 2020, Electronic Literature Organization Research Fellow and UNESCO Janusz Korczak Fellow. He'll lead us on a whirlwind tour of his new African elit database, and we will discuss:How can we recognize hypertexts in African discourse and bring them to scholars' and readers' attention?What are the barriers for elit in African nations and how can we overcome these?

What would the next steps be in integrating the African elit database into other elit databases

(Salon invitation)

In 1996, Geoff Ryman released 253: or Tube Theatre, a novel that used hypertext linking to set the stage for his fictitious story about the crash of a London Underground train. The text is divided into seven sections, one for each of the train’s cars, which are further subdivided into passages, one for each of the 252 passengers and its driver. Two years later, a print version of the novel was released as 253: The Print Remix. The print version maintains the same structure, but uses an index to mimic the hyperlinking used in the original. Although the two texts are otherwise identical, they were not equally reviewed by readers, as many found that Ryman’s narrative fell flat in print; as Robert Kendall (2000) writes, “though the book was generally well received, some reviewers complained that it suffered from the loss of its interactive element.” Others more harshly criticized the print version as “an example of form obliterating content” (Mitchell 1998), while at the same time praising the hypertext version as a “curiously addictive form of storytelling, relying on both the illusion that the reader is shaping the story though choosing which links to follow, and the voyeuristic joy of finding out what people really think on the tube.” That these two texts, which share the same restrictions on form, were reviewed so differently reveals the necessity of investigating platform effects. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s theories of neurosis and perversion, this paper examines how the two texts produce different forms of enjoyment that contribute to their disparate reviews. The change in platform, as I argue, does not only alter the text’s signification (Grossman 1997), but changing how readers navigate the text alters the voyeuristic fantasy conveyed by its narrative that promises to permit readers to peer into the lives of the strangers around them.Although Ryman’s text is now 25 years old, it has been chosen in part as an opportunity to reflect on how audience’s thinking about electronic platforms has since shifted. 253 was once notable for its release on two platforms, though this practice is commonplace today. It was also fairly recently that Ryman’s novel disappeared from his website, ryman-novel.com. According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (archive.org) and corroborated by websites that maintain records of domain registrations, Ryman’s ownership of the website ended in 2018. In its place, the website appears to have been taken over by so-called domain squatters and currently contains a number of short articles about Ryman, but its links now redirect users to more dubious sites. The challenges of preserving and archiving digital literature are well-known (see Abba 2012, Dene 2018, Schrimpf 2008), but thankfully 253 remains accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which last produced a snapshot of the novel on August 5th, 2017. In analyzing this novel, this paper makes a case for its continued relevance to discussions of new media platforms in a contemporary context.

This thesis examines key examples of materially experimental writing (B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1, and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch), hypertext fiction (Geoff Ryman's 253, in both the online and print versions), and video games (Catherine, L.A. Noire, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Phantasmagoria), and asks what new critical understanding of these 'interactive' texts, and their broader significance, can be developed by considering the examples as part of a textual continuum. Chapter one focuses on materially experimental writing as part of the textual continuum that is discussed throughout this thesis. It examines the form, function, and reception of key texts, and unpicks emerging issues surrounding truth and realism, the idea of the ostensibly 'infinite' text in relation to multicursality and potentiality, and the significance of the presence of authorial instructions that explain to readers how to interact with the texts. The discussions of chapter two centre on hypertext fiction, and examine the significance of new technologies to the acts of reading and writing. This chapter addresses hypertext fiction as part of the continuum on which materially experimental writing and video games are placed, and explores reciprocal concerns of reader agency, multicursality, and the idea of the 'naturalness' of hypertext as a method of reading and writing. Chapter three examines video games as part of the continuum, exploring the relationship between print textuality and digital textuality. This chapter draws together the discussions of reciprocity that are ongoing throughout the thesis, examines the significance of open world gaming environments to player agency, and unpicks the idea of empowerment in players and readers. This chapter concludes with a discussion of possible cultural reasons behind what I argue is the reader's/player's desire for a high level of perceived agency.The significance of this thesis, then, lies in how it establishes the existence of several reciprocal concerns in these texts including multicursality/potentiality, realism and the accurate representation of truth and, in particular, player and reader agency, which allow the texts to be placed on a textual continuum. This enables cross-media discussions of the reciprocal concerns raised in the texts, which ultimately reveals the ways in which our experiences with these interactive texts are deeply connected to our anxieties about agency in a cultural context in which individualism is encouraged, but our actual individual agency is highly limited.

In searching for literary models for digital writing, current scholarship will often suggest James Joyce, yet pioneering writers working directly indigital forms looked repeatedly instead to British Romantic authors. This dissertation examines the early history of electronic literature, showing the significance of a Romantic tradition with which a selection of digital authors self-consciously identified themselves and their goals. Electronic literature is an emerging genre of literary works which are designed to be read on a computer, and by focusing on the pre-Web 2.0 era, my project looks specifically to the largely text-based sub-genres of interactive fiction and hypertext fiction, non-linear works which respectively enable progression through text inputs from users or clicking hyperlinks. Though many major scholars of digital humanities are Romanticists by training, the critical history of electronic literature focuses heavily on the genre’s modernist and postmodernist contexts. Expanding our set of media histories, my dissertation offers a new genealogy of electronic writing. An early work of interactive fiction, for instance, A Mind Forever Voyaging, draws specifically on William Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic poem The Prelude in its vision of datascapes, the value of the imagination inforesight, and the role of a witnessing subject in recording social changes. A few years later, in developing the first work of hypertext fiction, Michael Joyce is thinking explicitly of Goethe, Keats, Byron, and Mary Shelley in envisioning what this new medium could become. The influence of Mary Shelley in particular on hypertext is established already through Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, one of the most widely analyzed works of hypertext, a story of Shelley piecing back together the female creature from Frankenstein herself. Even here, though, the Romantic influence has not yet been analyzed in-depth, nor has it been shown how this point of influence extends further through all three of Jackson’s hypertext projects. In writing on online interactive fictions, Indra Sinha traced the lineage of online explorers back to Coleridge and De Quincey. These writers saw the Romantic imagination as central to their practice, and by mapping out these influences, I open new possibilities in our understanding of this medium.

Shipwrecks, train wrecks, and wrecked hearts permeate Tim McLaughlin’s Notes Toward Absolute Zero (NTAZ), a hypertext narrative produced with Storyspace in 1993 and published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1995 on 3.5-inch floppy disk and in 1996 on CD-ROM. As the title suggests, it is a story about cold so absolute that order and predictability are lost. As Rob Kendall points out in his study of the work, “Parsing the Cold: McLaughlin’s Notes Toward Absolute Zero,” the overarching theme of the narrative is the power of cold to both destroy and preserve. 

This paper reports on an the initial stages of compiling a comprehensive, historically deep "atlas" of the structures of interactive stories, with initial surveys in branching narrative genres including gamebooks, hypertext fictions, visual novels, and Twine games. In particular, it considers the "gap" between approaches to two highly related yet radically different archives of branching works: an archive of over 2500 interactive print gamebooks stretching from the 1920s to the present, and contemporary collections of the approximately 1500-2000 extant Twine games available in popular public repositories such as the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and itch.io. What do we find when we consider these forms of electronic literature (and their crucial precurors) as one comprehensive atlas of a vast transmedia territory of interactive storytelling? Which methods may be adapted between print and digital works, and which demand new approaches?In summer 2017 the Transverse Reading Project began surveying an archive of over ~2500 interactive gamebooks in the Katz Collection at UC Santa Barbara -- and began building a collection of visualized interactive plot structures that shape a reader's choices. Mapping interactive stories is a tradition in gamebook culture, with examples of mapping by authors and readers dating back to at least the 1930s. Writers created hand-drawn maps as an aid to writing -- and then readers re-created their own maps as an aid to tracking the explored and unexplored options of interactive reading. In this project, data visualized "story maps" use similar network graphs that simultaneously reflect the branching plot structures of each gamebook or digital game, the way scenes are ordered in the pages of the codex, and the order of individual choices on each page. In addition, the patterns of an "interactive periodic table of elements" are extracted for each work.In print, data was collected by student researchers using a custom format for rapidly encoding gamebooks (~30 minutes on average), and data-mined / visualized using the open source and cross-platform software tool Edger -- which was custom written for this project. These techniques of data collection, visualization, and exploration will are of particular interest to scholars in related popular interactive genres such as visual novels, Twine games, or life sims. In the second case study, on Twine, automatic harvesting and mapping methods where used to extract network patterns from a large subset of publicly available Twine works -- with results bringing in to focus both the deep similarities and the surprising differences in interactive works from the 1930s to today.

(source: ELO 2018 website)

In this paper, I introduce two dimensions for classifying interactive digital narratives to allow comparisons between works in different traditions with the aim to improve the dialogue across these divides. Electronic literature and other forms of interactive digital narratives exist in many forms, amongst them Interactive Fiction (IF), hypertext fiction (HF), narrative-focused video games, interactive documentaries, art installations and VR/AR works. Between these different forms, underlying models, artistic approaches and descriptive vocabulary differ considerably. I propose to map different works and positions along the dimensions of narrative status and player/interactor role. These two dimensions enable comparisons and are a stepping stone towards a more developed analytical matrix in the future