This essay is a study of six of the 13 editions of Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story that shows a significant number of structural changes relating to work’s hyperlinking strategy and choices over paths to follow that affect the reader’s experience.
My study highlights the need to pay attention to variations in editions. As Kirschenbaum points out in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, the novel “is typically cited without any acknowledgement or awareness of the differences between its versions, or even the fact that multiple versions exist” (195). afternoon, a story exists in 13 manifestations and, so it, is important to clarify which is used when publishing research about it.
This essay introduces Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 3 that documents born-digital literary works published on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other media formats held among the 300 in Dene Grigar's personal collection in the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver.
Volume Three presents five more works published by Eastgate Systems, Inc., beginning with the first to have been published on Storyspace software to the most recent:
Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987-2016)Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991)M. D. Coverley’s Califia (2000)Megan Heyward’s of day, of night (2004)Mark Bernstein’s Those Trojan Girls (2016)