Is Hypertext Literature Dead?

First time accepted submitter dylan_k writes "In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a lot of buzz about ideas like 'hypertext literature' and 'electronic literature.' Nowadays, it's easier to create those things than ever before, and there are plenty of digital texts but it just doesn't seem like authors are writing any new 'hypertext' literature these days. Why?"

Re:Pet Food

[Solandri]

The problem with hypertext manuals IMHO stems from viewing them with what's effectively a single-threaded reader. I run Firefox with the Tree Style Tab [mozilla.org] extension, which organizes my tabs much like early threaded newsgroup readers a couple decades ago. This is perfect for reading HTML manuals. If I want to delve more deeply into a links on a page, they open up in new tabs all sorted by hierarchy. Reading hyperthreaded Linux manuals in Firefox is a joy. Reading Microsoft manuals in their outdated help app is a pain.

Re:One man's Britannica is another man's Dickens

[SQLGuru]

The best case for Hypertext Literature is the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. Those evolved into the old Infocom games which turned into the Sierra games which turned into RPG games which evolved into MMOs. If you want to do Hypertext Literature, pick one of the various forms of evolution and be done with it.

Re:Pet Food

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Reading Microsoft manuals in their outdated help app is a pain.

Behold, a Firefox extension for reading CHM files. [mozilla.org] :)

Re:It's not dead, it just smells funny.

[narcc]

Blogs are not hypertext literature any more than an webpage or a heavily annotated eBook would be considered hypertext literature.

Hypertext literature is an entirely different beast. Aaraseth's Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature discusses it at length. Unfortunately (or fortunately!) he's one of the few who took the medium seriously.

Janet Murray also writes briefly about it Hamlet on the holodeck and Nick Montfort (the average slashdotter should know who he is) mentions it briefly near the beginning of Twisty little passages.

For actual works of hypertext literature, you should check out Jackson's "Patchwork girl" and Joyce's "Afternoon". Of course, after you stumbled through those two, you'll see why hypertext literature never really took off

Re:What literary problem is it solving?

[retchdog]

the definitive "hyperlinks" for the bible were published in 1890 and known as Strong's Concordance (which is, btw, possibly the most badass-sounding book title in the history of english), or more accurately Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. there's a modern hyperlinked version here [biblestudytools.com] based on it, called the Interlinear Bible, which is remarkably similar and effective.

the problem with hyperlinks in literature is, i think, that they have to be both thorough and noticeable in order to be any better than mere footnotes. however, this means that they are going to be distracting, and most readers will end up skimming through the entire book wikipedia-style instead of reading it. i remember reading some awful literature on a cd-rom on my middle school computers, that tried to exploit this, but it didn't work very well. i guess a custom reader could be made to restrict hyperlinks somehow, but this is aesthetically hard to design; will probably have compatibility problems; and may even be intrinsically frustrating to the reader.

it's notable that much of the function of Strong's Concordance is to help the dedicated reader work through translation issues. it's a "metatextual" scholarly tool.

some kindle books have a feature where you can read other peoples' annotations. i think it's kind of sleazy to put a social network in a book, but it's maybe the only literary hypertext that is actually at all functional right now. note, again, this is metatextual.