Webliography for "A Teenager's Dreams"
Carolyn Guyer's essay on Fiction on the Web appeared in the September 1995 issue of the FEED E-zine. The bulk of her article concerns collaborative fiction, but I believe that much of it applies to tree-fiction and other hypertexts, particularly the following quote about the role of the reader: "Let me offer one of my favorite stories . . . related by Vivian Paley in her book, The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter. A 3-year-old in one of her preschool classes is the author. It goes like this: "'A crayon comes . . . a paper. . . a scissors.' Obviously, the ellipses are yours. That's where the story is, where the reader joins the writer and the contour of event begins to form. We do this every day of course. Parts of conversation, bits of description, fragments we hear and see tend to coalesce into remembered wholes." This pretty much sums up what I hoped to happen after constructing "A Teenager's Dreams" in Storyspace, where the structure insists upon small pieces of information connected by links. There is more information on myown experience authoring in Storyspace in the Author's Preface. Also, at the end of Guyer's article, she posts a list of web hyperfiction that she calls "broadly multifarious and completely partial," but which provided a good beginning point for my investigations on what else was "out there."
- An annotated Listing of Web Hyperfiction available through the Hyperizons Fiction Journal. They also have a really great bibliography of on-line readings in hyperfiction theory that I found very helpful.
- Jurgen Fauth wrote an essay for the Mississippi Review Web (September 1995) called "Poles in Your Face: The Promises and Pitfalls of Hyperfiction" that seems to have been severed from its URL, but I, luckily, have a printout. He writes, "Many of the hyperstories found online are lacking in content and quality writing because the novelty of hypertext makes all other aesthetic concerns secondary, " and says, correctly I think, that " What seems hard to grasp is that the result of a hypertext reading is not anything different from a linear story -- the hyperstructure remains invisible to the reader, it is only in place to generate multiple linear readings." Even more important to my particular construction in "A Teenager's Dreams," was Fauth's catagorization of my sort of text as "advanced footnoting . . . a link will yield to a node that yields more information on a given subject without conflicting with the continuity of the story" (as opposed to Michael Joyce's "afternoon: a story," in which the links can entirely transform the reader's experience with the narrative). Furth also quotes Robert Coover's fears of authoring in hypertext, which equate very closely with my own experience: "The structuring of the space can be so compelling and confusing as to utterly absorb and neutralize the narrator and to exhaust the reader. If the author is free to take a story anywhere at any time and in as many directions as she or her wishes, does that not become the obligation to do so?" (Coover, "The End of Books," New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1992). Although I ultimately disagree with Furth's stringent pessimism about the future of hyperfiction, I think he clearly elucidates some of the issues that surround the process of authoring in a hypertext medium.
- A Manifesto for Hyperauthors, particularly the section on "Tasks for the New Hyperauthors," was useful to me in considering some of the philosophical considerations of authors (as opposed to theorists or critics). The Manifesto is published by the creators of the Walking Man collaborative fiction project.
- Eastgate Systems' Introduction to Storyspace is an important tool for authoring in Storyspace, and has links to Storyspace authors like Jay David Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop and Michael Joyce, including web-examples of some of their endeavors that have been converted to HTML.
- The Electronic Labyrinth also has an introduction to authoring in Storyspace. It's only one small part of the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities web site, which is amazing.
- Stuart Moulthrop's listing of his hypertexts, some of which are only available in Macintosh Hypercard, and therefore inaccessible (to me, anyway), but it was informative for me to see other HTML documents that were originally constructed for Storyspace.
- An organization called Chorus did a thorough review of Storyspace for the Humanities Computing Review E-zine. It includes screen shots of various stages of composition and a good analysis of some of the strengths of the format.
- The Library of Congress' HTML Resource Page is useful mostly as an index -- it seems to be linked to most of the big tutorials, style guides, and databases for graphics.
- An online guide titled "How do they do that with HTML?" was very useful to me for some of the basics (such as backgrounds and colors).
- Yale University's Center for Advanced Instructional Media publishes lots of excellent and clear advice (including site integrity, graphic design, etc.) in their Web Authoring Style Guide. I tried to use the principles there, combined with some from Gareth Rees' Style Guide, when designing this site.