An interactive fiction written in Google Docs. The story starts in a dream, then you wake up in your bedroom and must begin to make choices. The work was made during the COVID-19 lockdown, and online team playing was encouraged as a way to counteract physical social distancing.
This book introduces and defines the new field of digital literature, answering to the question of the introduction of hypertext if it has suposed a reconfiguration of the literary paradigm in all its areas: theoretical, creative and educational. The theory, ideology and politics of hypertext are examined from a view of a theory of the hypertextual links, which proposes an original typology that is used as a tool for the analysis of literary digital texts (Source: Aurea Library) (Translated by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua).
Pentagonal: incluidos tú y yo by Carlos Labbé is a hypertextual short story that starts with newspaper news in which some words are liks to other fragments of the text. With the exception of the first screeen the rest of the interface is text with links. It combines quotations, science (astronomy) and the story with short fragments quite disorganized. It is difficult for the reader to build the structure of the narrative and he/she can lose interest after certain jumps (Félix Rémirez, translated by Maya Zalbidea)
Pentagonal: incluidos tú y yo de Carlos Labbé es un relato hipertextual en el que se parte de una noticia en un periódico algunas de cuyas palabras son enlaces a otros fragmentos del texto. Con la excepción de esa primera pantalla, el resto de la interface es prácticamente puro texto con enlaces. Combina citas, ciencia (astronómica) y el propio relato con fragmentos cortos y un tanto deslavazados. Al lector le es difícil construir la estructura de la narración y se puede perder el interés tras una decena de saltos (Félix Rémirez)
Proposes rhetorical terms for different kinds of linking.
"Jumping to Occlusions" is perhaps the first thorough statement of a poetics of online space. In the present hypertextual trickster edition, a lively investigative language of the link is employed helping to develop this essay's written argument through its own hypertextuality -- its jumps, sidebars, graphics, embedded sound files, misleadings, and other features. This essay explores electronic technology's opportunities for the production, archiving, distribution, and promotion of poetic texts but most importantly, argues that electronic space is a space of writing. For previous excursions into this a written terrain of links and jumps one need only look to the language experiments of certain poets writing in this century. Such poets include Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Language-related experimentalists such as Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and Susan Howe. Electronic writing, like previous instances of writing, engages the double "mission" of writing evident in some of this experimental poetry: to varying degrees, writing is about a subject, but also about the medium through which it is transmitted. If relevant previous poetic experiments involved the exploration of language as physical, what are the physical parameters of webbed online space? Texts move not only within themselves but into socially-charged externalities, "a webbed interference of junk mail, 'frets' of information, systemic failures, ephemera, disunion. There is no resting place -- only the incessantly reconstituted links dissolving each time the reading is entered." The physical features most up for grabs? These include online hypertext itself, a mass of fits and starts. Links are at the center of an electronic hypertextual writing and links introduce disjunction. This post-typographic and non-linear disunion is no news to poetics. It is through a poetics of experimental poetries that a framework is sketched and progress is made towards the building of an electronic poetics, one where experiments that changed poetic language may inform the electronic air we breathe.
(Author's abstract in PMC)
Hypertext allows sequences throughout sequences. However, a serious point of difference must be taken with some Web utopianists: despite tendencies in this direction, the point is not that everything is linked through these sequences The constitution of any such whole could only be a misrepresentation of stability, the futile pursuit of yet another encyclopedia. The insistences of the internal orders of texts do not add stability to the text, rather they add a perplexing layer of instability; it is the "failure" of the links, whether they connect or not, that gives them their activity and it is through this activity that electronic writing departs irreversibly from the world of print.
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.
A challenge peculiar to hypertext support is the difficulty of disambiguating a request for purely technical assistance from a request for help with rhetoric or literary interpretatioon.
The size of the link networks in these documents is often formidable. “In Small & Large Pieces”, a story of just 13,000 words, has 2,622 links. “Lust”, with just 1,731 words, has 141 links.
Because text links are revealed by pressing a special key with the hand that doesn’t hold the mouse, Storyspace encourages a two- handed reading posture.
Notes from the panelists on notable works of electronic literature produced outside the USA, with a focus on Spanish and Catalan, French/Canadian, and Nordic works.
AbstractWhat is the difference between reading on screen and reading electronic literature? Between an e-book and an e-lit piece? Electronic literature, or eliterature, uses computer technology as an integral part of the work to convey meaning. Find out about the literary art of links, images, sounds, and motions. Make connections between images and text, between sounds and words, between motions and implications. Uncover an exciting new world where writers expand beyond the page and embrace the screen with an array of new literary techniques.
AgendaThis workshop will cover 4 basic elements of electronic literature: links, imagery, motion, and sound. For each element, we will read a portion of works to see these elements in action, take part in an exercise to explore writing using these elements, and discuss techniques to recognize and understand these elements.
LinksLinks in most hypertexts (bbc news, blogs, wikipedia) are substantive links—follow these for a further elaboration on a topic. Links in eliterature can be substantive, but they can also be causal, associative, expansive, reductive, playful, etc. Thus the link itself becomes a literary device, as flexible as a metaphor or litotes.
Sample: Deena Larsen's Ghost Moons <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/deena/tsuki/>Flit link on 'everything' goes to lover, implying a connection between love and everything and link on "nothing" goes to everything, showing a contradiction.Exercise: Participants choose two pictures from the set and a string to link the two—and describe how the link connects the two pictures.Sample: The Unknown <http://www.unknownhypertext.com>Show associations between links (follow a few links and discuss why that link landed on the page).
ImageryImagery overlays text to tease out overtones or implications in the text. Imagery can also contrast the text, implying a contradiction with the words. Imagery can also have meaning in itself.
Sample: Rob Kendall's Study in Shades<http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/00/04/kendall/index.htm>Show how the images support the meaning of the text—the daughter disappears as the father sinks into Alzheimers, and the father's contrast—black and white rather than gray—is darkened as the daughter faces who he is now.Exercise: Write a sentence and pick two images—see how the sentence changes meaning when juxtaposed with each image.Sample: Stuart Moulthrop's Radio Salience<http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/07Spring/moulthrop/moulthropbi… how imagery can become a game, and can lead to more pieces.
MotionMotions can be fast, abrupt, flowing, slow or nearly imperceptible. The motion of the text can reveal new words, obscure connections, force a reading pace (either slower or faster than average reading paces), and create storylines. Motions can be with images or with texts.
Sample of revealing and concealing text by motion: Rob Kendall's Faith <http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/kendall__faith/index.htm>Shows how texts can be re-arranged through motion.Exercise: Get a partner and write two sentences. One person reads while the other dances about, creating a second layer of meaning to the words.Sample: Peter Howard's Rainbow Factory<http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/flash/rainbow.html>Simple animated graphics provide two perspectives.
SoundSound can carry words that echo the text or contradict the text. Sound can be music, language, sound effects, etc. We will concentrate on word sounds here, as we have seen sound effects used (Peter Howard's Rainbow Factory) and music used (Rob Kendall's Faith).
Sample: John Sparrow, eye in the making<http://www.canberra.edu.au/centres/ inflect/03/Sparrow/eye_newer%20Folder/eye.html>Shows one word and repeats another word for multiple meanings.Exercise: Play a sound. Participants write two sentences that merge with or bouce off of the sound, and explain how the sound and text go together. Play a new sound and examine how the sentences work with this sound. Write a new sentence that works with this sound.Sample: Deena Larsen, I'm Simply Saying<http://www.canberra.edu.au/centres/inflect/02/larsen/simply7.html>Uses music/motion to uncover the multiple meanings in words.
Follow UpParticipants will be given a list of further readings to explore electronic literature in email (Rob Wittig's Blue Company <http://www.robwit.net/bluecompany2002/>), blogs (She's a flight risk <http://shes.aflightrisk.org/>), and social network applications (Why some dolls are bad). This list will include places to view electronic literature (e.g., "Drunken Boat," "Iowa Review," Electronic Literature Organization).
(Source: Deena Larsen's description for the 2008 ELO Conference)