Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provide a new context for non-linearity in "literature" and reader interaction.^[1] The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.

The term can also be used to describe traditionally-published books in which a nonlinear narrative and interactive narrative is achieved through internal references. James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Enrique Jardiel Poncela's La Tournée de Dios (1932), Jorge Luis Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) and Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963; translated as Hopscotch) are early examples predating the word "hypertext", while a common pop-culture example is the Choose Your Own Adventure series in young adult fiction and other similar gamebooks. The Garden of Forking Paths is both a hypertext story and a description of a fictional hypertext work.

History[link]

The first hypertext fictions were published prior to the development of the World Wide Web, using software such as Storyspace and HyperCard. Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a story, first presented in 1987 and published by Eastgate Systems in 1991, is generally considered one of the first hypertext fictions. Afternoon was followed by a series of other Storyspace hypertext fictions from Eastgate Systems, including Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, its name was Penelope by Judy Malloy, (whose hyperfiction Uncle Roger was published online on Artcom Electronic Network on The WELL from 1986 to 1987) Carolyn Guyer's Quibbling, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl and Deena Larsen's Marble Springs. Judy Malloy's l0ve0ne, created in 1994, was the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop.

Douglas Cooper's Delirium (1994) was the first novel serialized on the World Wide Web; it permitted navigation between four parallel story strands. On June 21, 1996, Bobby Rabyd (aka Robert Arellano) published the World Wide Web's first interactive novel,^[2] Sunshine 69, with navigable maps of settings, a nonlinear calendar of scenes, and a character "suitcase" enabling readers to try on nine different points of view. Shortly thereafter, in 1997, Mark Amerika released GRAMMATRON, a multi-linear work which was eventually exhibited in art galleries. In 2000, it was included in the Whitney Biennial of American Art.^[3]

Some other web examples of hypertext fiction include Adrienne Eisen's Six Sex Scenes (1995), Stuart Moulthrop's Hegirascope (1995,1997), The Unknown (which won the trAce(Alt X award in 1998), The Company Therapist, and Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls (2001) (which won the ELO award for fiction in 2001).

The internationally oriented but US based Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) was founded in 1999 to promote the creation and enjoyment of electronic literature. Other organisations for the promotion of electronic literature include trAce Online Writing Community, a British organisation, started in 1995, that has fostered electronic literature in the UK, Dichtung Digital, a journal of criticism of electronic literature in English and German, and ELINOR, a network for electronic literature in the Nordic countries, which provides a directory of Nordic electronic literature. The Electronic Literature Directory lists many works of electronic literature in English and other languages.

See also[link]

• Interactive novel
• Cybertext
• Hypertext poetry
• Storyspace

References[link]

1. ^ Bishop, J. (2009). Enhancing the understanding of genres of web-based communities: The role of the ecological cognition framework. International Journal of Web-Based Communities, 5(1), 4-17. Available online
2. ^ Ciccarello, Lisa. "Swiveling My Hips through the Interbunk (And Having a Great Time, Too)". Pif Magazine: January, 2000.
3. ^ Artists Selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial

• Cicconi, Sergio (2000). "The Shaping of Hypertextual Narrative". The Integrated Media Machine: A Theoretical Framework, Ed. M. Yla-Kotola, J. Suoranta, S. Inkinen & J. Rinne. Helsinki: University of Lapland. 101-120. http://www.cisenet.com/cisenet/writing/essays/hypernarrative.htm. 
• Allen, Michael (2003). "This Is Not a Hypertext, But...: A Set of Lexias on Textuality". ctheory.net, Ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=389. 
• "The hypertext Tristram Shandy page", David R. Hammontree's page
• The Non-linear Tradition in Literature from The Electronic Labyrinth by Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin and Robin Parmar
• Andersen, Alan Lance (1981). "Elfland catacombs", Ames, Iowa: Winterhearth.
• Malloy, Judy (1998). "Hypernarrative in the Age of the Web". Portions of which were published on the National Endowment for the Arts Web Site. http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/neapaper.html. 
• Ensslin, Astrid (2007). Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions. London: Continuum.

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (August 2010)

• 253 by Geoff Ryman
• Revelations of Secret Surveillance by Judy Malloy
• "8 minutes" by Martha Conway
• Hypertexts and Interactive Narratives at Cyberculture Studies
• (FILE) — Electronic Language International Festival.Festival of new media art.
• Starry Pipe Book
• Adrienne Eisen
• "ebbflux: machine text" by gmb (2000)
• Online Caroline
• RYOH — Roll Your Own Hypertext.
• The Shaping of Hypertextual Narrative (by Sergio Cicconi)
• Electronic Literature Organization (for more on hypertext literature)
• Dichtung Digital. Journal for Digital Aesthetics. (Texts in English and German). Editor Roberto Simanowski.
• Eastgate catalog (catalog of historically significant Hypertext fiction, nonfiction and poetry)

Born	(1932-02-04) February 4, 1932 (age 80) Charles City, Iowa, U.S.
Occupation	writer
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Indiana University
Period	1960s-
Genres	short story, novel
Influenced Mary Caponegro, Jacob Appel, Dave Eggers, Steven Millhauser, Ken Kalfus, Rick Moody, Jonathan Lethem

Robert Lowell Coover (born February 4, 1932) is an American author and professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.

Life and works[link]

Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale, received his B.A. in Slavic Studies from Indiana University in 1955, then served in the United States Navy. He received an M.A. in General Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago in 1965. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.^[1] Coover has served as a teacher or writer in residence at many universities.

Coover's first novel was The Origin of the Brunists, in which the sole survivor of a mine disaster starts a religious cult. His second book, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., deals with the role of the creator. The eponymous Waugh, a shy, lonely accountant, creates a baseball game in which rolls of the dice determine every play, and dreams up players to attach those results to.

Coover's best-known work, The Public Burning, deals with the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in terms that have been called magic realism. Half of the book is devoted to the mythic hero Uncle Sam of tall tales, dealing with the equally fantastic Phantom, who represents international Communism. The alternate chapters portray the efforts of Richard Nixon to find what is really going on amidst the welter of narratives.

A later novella, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears offers an alternate Nixon, one who is devoted to football and sex with the same doggedness with which he pursued political success in this reality. The theme anthology A Night at the Movies includes the story "You Must Remember This", a piece about Casablanca that features an explicit description of what Rick and Ilsa did when the camera wasn't on them. Pinocchio in Venice returns to mythical themes.

Coover demonstrating the "CaveWriting" software

Coover is one of the founders of the Electronic Literature Organization. In 1987 he was chosen as the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Coover is indeed one of the foremost short story writers of the postmodern period, as exemplified by the "Seven Exemplary Fictions" contained in his 1969 book Pricksongs and Descants, which has influenced a new generation of writers, notably Jayne Joso for the 2011 novel, Perfect Architect.

See also[link]

• Electronic literature

Selected Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

• The Origin of the Brunists (1966)
• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968)
• The Public Burning (1977), completed 1975^[2]
• Gerald's Party (1986)
• A Night at the Movies or, You Must Remember This (1987) (themed anthology)
• Pinocchio in Venice (1991)
• John's Wife (1996)
• Ghost Town (1998)
• The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director's Cut (2002)
• Noir (2010)

Short stories, Novellas, Plays & Collections[link]

• Pricksongs & Descants (1969) (collection)
• The Babysitter (1969) (short story)
• A Theological Position (1972) (plays)
• A Political Fable (1980) (novella)
• Spanking the Maid (1982) (novella)
• In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters (1983) (collection)
• Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears (1987) (novella)
• Dr. Chen's Amazing Adventure (1991) (novella)
• Briar Rose (1996) (novella)
• The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) (2002) (novella)
• Stepmother (2004) (novella)
• A Child Again (2005) (collection)
• "The Case of the Severed Hand" Harper's Magazine 317 [1898] (July 2008): 74-80
• "White-Bread Jesus" Harper's Magazine 317 [1903] (December 2008): 79-88
• "Going for a beer" The New Yorker (March 14, 2011)
• "Matinée" The New Yorker (July 25, 2011)

Non-Fiction[link]

• The End of Books (1992) (essay)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Robert Coover

• Faculty Home Page at Brown University
• "Robert Coover". Providencephoenix.com. http://www.providencephoenix.com/archive/books/99/04/01/COOVER.html. Retrieved 2011-08-19. – Interview
• IMDB
• The End of Books
• Rettberg, Scott. "A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover on Vimeo". Vimeo.com. http://vimeo.com/1765099. Retrieved 2011-08-19. – Novelist Robert Coover's keynote address at the Electronic Literature in Europe seminar (elitineurope.net), September 13, 2008. Introduced by Scott Rettberg. Videography by Martin Arvebro.

This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from related articles; suggestions may be available. (April 2011)

Alexandra Grant (born 1973 in Fairview Park, Ohio) is a Los Angeles-based artist,^[1] who uses language as a source for imagery in sculpture,^[2] painting, drawing and video.

Life[link]

She graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in 1995, and from California College of the Arts with a MFA in 2000.^[3]

Grant’s first solo exhibition at a museum was in 2007, organized by curator Alma Ruiz, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). A catalog from the exhibition features Grant’s large-scale works on paper, an essay on Grant’s work by Ruiz, and an essay that inspired Grant by Hélène Cixous the French writer and philosopher.

Numerous other shows at museums and galleries have included Grant’s work, including the 2010 California Biennial of Art at the Orange County Museum of Art, the Artists’ Museum at MOCA, and Human Nature: Contemporary Art from the Collection at LACMA.

Grant is known as a ‘radical collaborator’ – the longest of her exchanges being with the pioneering writer of hypertext fiction, Michael Joyce. The paintings and sculpture based on Joyce’s texts (using them as scores or scripts to interpret rather than follow) have been the subject of at least three series: the Ladder Quartet (shown at MOCA in 2007), the Six Portals (shown at Honor Fraser gallery in 2008), and Bodies (shown at Honor Fraser gallery in 2010).

Grant is also known for her work in collaboration with the Watts House Project, a non-profit in Watts, across the street from the Watts Towers. She was the Founding Board Chair of the organization, working with director Edgar Arceneaux, and is the creator of the Love House, a renovation of a house on 107th Street designed with the Cerant Family and architects Roberto Sheinberg and Arnold Swanborn. Grant’s idea in creating the Love symbol is that an artist can also be a philanthropist.^[4]

In early 2011, Gerhard Steidl published the Ode to Happiness, in collaboration with Keanu Reeves. It was Grant’s first artist book and Reeves’ first book as a writer.^[5]

Grant is currently working with Cixous, on a project revolving around that writer’s book Philippines.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Artist's website
• "A way with words", Modern Edition
• "Interview with Alexandra Grant", ArtSlant Ed Schad
• "It Speaks to Me: Alexandra Grant on R.B. Kitaj's 'How to Read' at LACMA", Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2010

Ted Nelson
Born	(1937-06-17) June 17, 1937 (age 75) Chicago, Illinois, United States
Fields	American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology
Institutions	Project Xanadu
Alma mater	Swarthmore College, Harvard University, Keio University
Known for	Hypertext

Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology (IT sociolosopher). He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published them in 1965. He also has been credited with first using the words transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity, and teledildonics.

Career[link]

Nelson founded Project Xanadu in 1960 with the goal of creating a computer network with a simple user interface. The effort is documented in his 1974 book Computer Lib / Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines. Much of his adult life has been devoted to working on Xanadu and advocating it.

The Xanadu project itself failed to flourish, for a variety of reasons which are disputed. Journalist Gary Wolf published an unflattering history on Nelson and his project in the June 1995 issue of Wired calling it "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing".^[1] Nelson expressed his disgust on his website,^[2] referring to Wolf as a "Gory Jackal" ("Gorkal"), and threatened to sue him. He also outlined his objections in a letter to Wired,^[3] and released a detailed rebuttal of the article.^[4]

Nelson claims some aspects of his vision are in the process of being fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web, but he dislikes the World Wide Web, XML and all embedded markup – regarding Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification of his original vision:

HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.^[5]

Nelson co-founded Itty bitty machine company, or "ibm", which was a small computer retail store operating from 1977 to 1980 in Evanston, Illinois. The Itty bitty machine company was one of the few retail stores to sell the original Apple I computer. In 1978 he had a significant impact upon IBM's thinking when he outlined his vision of the potential of personal computing to the team that three years later launched the IBM PC.^[6]

Ted Nelson is currently working on a new information structure, ZigZag,^[7] which is described on the Xanadu project website, which also hosts two versions of the Xanadu code. He also developed XanaduSpace, a system for the exploration of connected parallel documents (an early version of this software may be freely downloaded).^[8]

Education and awards[link]

Nelson earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959, a master's degree in sociology from Harvard University in 1963 and a Doctorate in Media and Governance from Keio University in 2002. In 1998, at the Seventh WWW Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Nelson was awarded the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award.

In 2001 he was knighted by France as "Officier des Arts et Lettres". In 2004 he was appointed as a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and associated with the Oxford Internet Institute, where he was a visiting fellow from 2004 through 2006.^[9]

In 2007 he celebrated his 70th birthday by giving an invited birthday lecture at the University of Southampton.^[10]

Personal life[link]

Nelson is the son of Emmy Award-winning director Ralph Nelson and the Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm.^[11]

His parents' marriage was brief and he was mostly raised by his grandparents, first in Chicago and later in Greenwich Village.^[12] He is of Norwegian and Swedish descent.

Nelson earned a BA from Swarthmore College in 1959. In 1960 he began graduate work at Harvard in philosophy. During college and graduate school, he envisioned a computer-based writing system that would provide a lasting repository for the world's knowledge and also permit greater flexibility of drawing connections between ideas. He later attributed this ambition, in part, to his need to track his disjointed mental activity brought about by attention deficit disorder.

The project became the overriding concern of his life. In 1965, he presented a paper at the Association for Computing Machinery in which he coined the term "hypertext".

Populitism[link]

Populitism is a neologism coined by Nelson, a portmanteau combining "populism" with "elite."^[13]

Works[link]

• Life, Love, College, etc. (1959)
• Computer Lib: You can and must understand computers now / Dream Machines: New freedoms through computer screens—a minority report (1974), Microsoft Press, revised edition 1987: ISBN 0-914845-49-7^[14]
• The Home Computer Revolution (1977)
• Literary Machines: The report on, and of, Project Xanadu concerning word processing, electronic publishing, hypertext, thinkertoys, tomorrow's intellectual revolution, and certain other topics including knowledge, education and freedom (1981), Mindful Press, Sausalito, California; publication dates as listed in the 93.1 (1993) edition: 1980–84, 1987, 1990–93
• The Future of Information (1997)
• A Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Data Model, Mechanisms, Virtual Machine and Visualization Infrastructure. Journal of Digital Information, Volume 5 Issue 1. Article No. 298, July 16, 2004
• Geeks Bearing Gifts: How The Computer World Got This Way (2008; Chapter summaries)
• POSSIPLEX: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization (2010), autobiography^[15][16]

Quotes[link]

• “Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong" ^{[note 1]}
• “A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.”
• “We should not impose regularity where it does not exist.”^[17]
• “I hope, that in our archives and historical filings of the future, we do not allow the techie traditions of hierarchy and false regularity to be superimposed to the teeming, fantastic disorderlyness of human life.”^[17]

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ted Nelson

• Ted Nelson's homepage
• Detailed Ted Nelson bibliography
• Xanadu project webpage
• Transliterature – A Humanist Design
• The Magical Place of Literary Memory: Xanadu in Screening the Past, July 2005 by Belinda Barnet
• Ted Nelson and Xanadu, in The Electronic Labyrinth, 1993
• Orality and Hypertext: An Interview with Ted Nelson
• Way Out Of The Box , by Theodor Nelson, October 8, 1999
• Software and Media for a New Democracy a talk given by Ted Nelson at the File festival Symposium/November/2005
• Wired article, recalling interview with Nelson, August 2005
• The Politics Of Internet Software 'Geeks Bearing Gifts', a talk given by Ted at the Oxford Internet Institute, November 30, 2005
• Transclusion: Fixing Electronic Literature, a talk given by Ted at Google, January 29, 2007