Hypertext Introduction I
Just as e-mail returns us to the daily letter-writing habits of the Victorians, hypertext and hypermedia also project us into the past. A thousand years ago ( and longer in some cultures) the book or text was not simply a a tightly bound tome of information but an aesthetic object, a work of art charged with painstaking creativity, executed in colored inks and gold leaf solely by hand.
Artists ornamented the letters themselves, painted miniature scenes as illustration, danced fantastic figures down the margins and often included set pieces of the illuminator's art, full-page paintings of labyrinthian complexity. Open the links on the colophon page to see how other cultures beyond the west also created books in the same way. Until the invention of the printing press in the late 1400s, the word 'book' was inseparable from the idea of art. You can see this in the earliest books that rolled off the printing presses, where printers tried to copy the techniques of illumination: decorated letters, the marginal designs, and so on. Go to the National Library of Holland's Hundred Highlights and look at #s 30 (very early 1500s), 34 (mid-1500s) and 54 (early 1600s). (Direct links to pictures not operating today)
In the next four centuries, the book as we know it evolved. Mechanical printing made the book cheaper to produce and sell: that in turn fueled a more general market for books and provided the raw materials for a slow, but steady increase in the number of people who could read. Illustration bled out of the equation: perhaps a highly decorated frontispiece and some line drawing, but no elaborate decoration. It was just too expensive. By the late nineteenth century, the critical component of the book was content locked into the word, not the aesthetic harmony of art and text, a trend accelerated by the mass market paperback which dominates book-buying today.
Our ability to create hypertext/hypermedia restores to us that role of writer as artist as well as thinker and communicator. Michael Joyce, in his book on hypertext, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics quoted in Thomas F. Costello's hypertext poem, "Owen Hill", writes "Hypertext vindicates the word as visual image and reclaims its place in the full sensorium." Pictures (still or moving) and sound create mood, set a tone, qualify or illuminate the writer's ideas, facilitate understanding, fend off boredom and multiply the sensual and intellectual pleasures of reading and writing.
Note an interesting cultural contradiction. Our society treasures and displays in museums illuminated manuscripts and validates them as part of our cultural heritage. Yet, perhaps as an indication of our cultural conservatism and closet elitism, the aesthetic potential of hypertext in writing and reading is largely ignored or dismissed as a bastardized semi-illiteracy, writing corrupted by television and short-attention span electronic culture.
For your reaction to a media event journal this week, look at the Umberto Eco article, "The Future of Literacy", now on reserve in the library. Then try to work out for yourself how the hypertext and its linkings through the internet might threaten traditional holders of cultural power in our society. How would you place electronic writing and reading within our culture? What does it mean to you?
Over the past three weeks we have looked at a wide variety of web pages: many deploy hypertext resources to sell consumer or cultural products or ideas, but others, the personal web pages, act as individual works of art and communication. This week I want to examine some of the ways we might use hypertext to our own writing.
Critical Reading and Writing
Wilfred Owen Isaac Rosenberg
Student Project
Sidestepping by Rodney Canete
A very clear, concise and thus easy-to-read article offering a brief history of hypertext/hypermedia and offering advice to writers in this environment. Please read this by next Friday.
Some of the articles here are very complex: the facility of this environment is that you can quickly check through these articles, already chosen for you by George Landow, a leading hypertext writer, teacher and theorist, until you find one you can understand and enjoy.
Explore some of these links: they range from the boring to the beautiful!
Choose either the Wilfred Owen site or the Student Project. Compare your experience as a reader of hypertext with your experience as a reader of text. What might these writers have gained by choosing a hypertext format? How easy is the material to read? Do you feel you are retaining more information through reading in this environment? What has your writer achieved in this format that helps you as a reader? What are the disadvantages in using hypertext that you can see from these examples?
Now think about your advertising paper. How might you have used a hypertext format to present your material (assume you could use still and moving pictures and sound)? What might you have achieved in hypertext that you did not achieve in text? What might your paper have lost?
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