Storyspace

Judy Malloy is a pioneer in the field of electronic literature. As she writes in this interview, she wrote the first hyperfiction in 1986 called “Uncle Rogers” a series of works of hypernarratives for Eastgate Systems, the first hypertext publishing house founded in 1982 in Watertown, Massachusetts (USA). The interview is a resume of her work as an author and visiting lecturer at Princeton University that still goes on as her latest publication in 2016 can prove.

Re-published interview with Mark Bernstein, founder and Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems.

The second featured interview with Mark Bernstein.

This presentation asks what we can learn about a foundational work of electronic literature – Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl – by porting it to a new platform. More than this, it asks what we can learn about the source and target platforms of such a porting exercise.

Thanks to a great deal of path breaking work, much scholarship on electronic literature now makes use of what Katherine Hayles calls media-specific analysis (MSA). The field has followed the lead of scholars such as Hayles, Nick Montfort, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Terry Harpold, and many others in assuming that the materialities at play in a digital artifact actively shape expression and interpretation. We no longer treat the screen as another page. Work adjacent to electronic literature has asked these same questions, attending to the role of software and hardware in digital expression. Platform studies offers one version of this line of inquiry, and it asks how a given computational platform shapes and constrains creative processes and products. Much like the tenets of MSA, platform studies insists that the various computational machines at work in a given piece of digital media act as more than a conduit or background to expression. Scholarship on electronic literature has already begun to engage with platform studies, most recently by way of Anastasia Salter and John Murray’s study of Flash. In their book-length study of this platform, Salter and Murray take up a number of works of electronic literature by authors such as Jason Nelson and Stuart Moulthrop.

This presentation will continue that work by porting Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl to the Twine platform. When Chris Klimas released Twine, it immediately drew comparisons to Storyspace, the platform used to create Patchwork Girl and many other works of electronic literature. Where Storyspace has guard fields that set up conditions by which text can be hidden from or revealed to the interactor, Twine implements an “if” Macro. Where Storyspace allows authors to group together lexia with “paths,” Twine offers a similar function called “tags.” Further, both platforms offer the writer a kind of “node-and-edge” view of the writing space. However, the very fact that these pieces of software were created two decades apart, by different developers, and in different media ecologies suggests that there are important differences between the two. In order to shed light on the differences and similarities of these platforms and also in the interest of returning to Patchwork Girl, this presentation will walk through what we learn from a Twine version of Jackson's work.

Hayles describes MSA as a kind of game: “Using the characteristics of the digital computer, what is it possible to say about electronic hypertext as a literary medium?” In this presentation, I propose a different version of Hayles’s game: What do we learn about a work of electronic literature, its native platform, and the target platform when we port it to a new platform?

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Our linear expectations of digital presentations (and the scorn associated with “Death by PowerPoint) have been transformed by the availability of tools such as Prezi, an editor that allows for the juxtaposition of images, text, and other media on a telescoping canvas that relies on linear paths for exploring nonlinear content. Prezi acts an infinite canvas, recalling Scott McCloud’s model for a future of sequential art on the web defined not by pages but by the screen as portal to an expanding and linked storyspace, allowing for continual layering of meaning and data using the methods of what Henry Jenkins describes as environmental storytelling. Alexandra Saemmer's use of Prezi as a space for experimenting with electronic literature breaks our expectations of a tool originally designed for presentations. The adaptation of tools of this kind towards the development of literary experiences reveals the fundamental transformations of procedural expectations and linked structures in online spaces: the co-location and linking of ideas to create meaning is now a matter of course. A similar limited model of the expanding canvas is used in Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile, a work whose digital iPad form more clearly conveys the extent of its connected and intertwined threads than the pages of its corresponding codex can contain. In considering the evolution of text within electronic literature, the nonlinear and interactive natures of a work often make even the most textual of electronic literature defy easy translation to printed codex. I’ll examine the juxtaposition of linear and nonlinear in these works, and suggest how we can see the impact of evolving conceptions of meaning in web spaces on electronic literature (and vice versa) through probing at the construction of text through rejection of the page.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/spirals-meaning-expl… )

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.

In this interview Dene Grigar tells about her approach to electronic literature in the early 1990s and about her work as curator for the exhibit "Electronic Literature and Its Emerging Forms" in 2015. She goes on describing some distinguishing features of electronic literature and explaining her 'conceptual shift' on regard to the way of working with computers. Finally she suggests some methods of analysis for the understanding of electronic literature for both academic scholars and mainstream audience.

A discussion of a range of hypertext fictions asking whether hypertext still matters in literature.

Report given at the Harry Ransom Center. Information lacking here.