Working Draft

Hypertext

For the initial years of my own ‘personal computing,’ I was exploring, experimenting, sometimes working in relation to activities which would seem to be quite divorced from or at odds with language art, at odds with what eventually motivated my chief investment in computation. Given those things that personal computers made or seemed to make possible, these other activities included: coding for coding’s sake, gaming, simple accounting, data collection & management. Until already quite developed in my own practices, if not quite advanced, I was unaware of literary engagements with computation in any form. I leave aside here my own introduction to computing – which was pre-personal and which is covered in other chapters. My particular computational initiation was first motivated by linguistics and textual criticism, and it might well have become literary critical, if it had developed as then anticipated.

In the 1980s – for myself after 1986 – there was a sense that databases were important for libraries, that the infrastructure, if not the material basis, of the archive was definitively changing, and that this might have impacts on cultural practices, even those of poetry and poetics. By the end of the 1980s I had left the world of librarianship and had entered into the adjacent domain of specialist bookselling, which although motivated by mercantile principles, retains crucial, even existential, attachments to scholarship and research. It was, somewhat ironically therefore, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, an event that is much more about marketing than it is about books, that I came to the practical realization that research, scholarship, literature would never be the same again, and this because of computation. The mere existence – and marketing – of books on so-called ‘floppy’ disks at this book fair proved to me that, at the very least, all of scholarship should be recorded and delivered digitally. And I believed that it would be, even then. I would, moreover, have proclaimed zealously, that this would happen much more quickly and thoroughly than, in the event, it did.

Well into the 1990s, more or less until I started attending, while still working in specialist bookselling, what I only later learned to recognize as ‘academic’ conferences, particularly the Digital Arts and Culture network, I remained unaware of the uneasy confluence of scholarly, documentary and literary practices with vibrant but still inchoate computer sciences, a confluence that was being fostered by some individuals and institutions in the United States, including at Brown University, the university where, as of this writing, I am still on the faculty. At the time, as I began to develop a relationship with the academic attention being paid to digital language art practices, I was more influenced by theories, networks, and institutions emerging around the concept of cybertext, particularly as set out by Espen Aarseth. (Aarseth, 1997) The story of hypertext at Brown University is one that is not only a significant contribution to the history of digital language art – or electronic literature – it is instructive as revealing certain of the contingencies and characteristics of this history.

Hypertext’s Literary History

By example in the academy:
from Hypertext to Digital Language Art at Brown University

I first visited Brown University as a function of my engagement with digital language art in 2001 when Digital Arts and Culture, the conference to which I had become habituated, was hosted by this institution. Before this time, I had no direct experience of the development of the field at Brown and so, for some specifics, I am relying on accounts provided by Scott Rettberg in his book Electronic Literature. (Rettberg, 2019)

Hypertext, as a concept, first entered my thinking in the early 1980s as related elsewhere. My first encounter with hypertext as something that might help, in part, to replace or enhance the conventional book as a way of reading was at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 19XX when I saw literature-driven floppy and video disks produce by the Voyager company. In 19XX I attended my first conference administered by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), Hypertext and Hypermedia, which serves ACM’s SIGLINK special interest group. This conference was notable, within the otherwise relatively dry, technical ACM domain, for being open to interested literary authors and scholars of literature, and for encouraging their contributions. I was becoming a little more familiar with some of the active figures in the field, some of whom were connected with Brown University.

Ted Nelson, who famously coined the term ‘hypertext’ in the early 1960s and published the term in 1965, had an association with Brown after meeting Andries (Andy) Van Dam in 1967. Professor of Computer Science at the university, Van Dam is well known as one of the most important founding figures of Computer Graphics. (He is said to have been further immortalised by having the Toy Story film fanchise’s Andy named for him.) Van Dam is also exemplary for his commitment to making computational applications that answer real world problems, not only those of industry, but also those of the humanities. With Nelson as a consultant, initially, Van Dam and his students engineered HES, the Hypertext Editing System. According to at least one authority, “HES was the world’s first word processor to run on commercial equipment. It was also the first hypertext system that beginners could use, and pioneered many modern hypertext concepts for personal use.” (Barnet, 2010) Van Dam’s teams went on to enhance and augment their hypertextual engagements with FRESS, the File Retrieval and Editing System, and then, finally, developed Brown’s all but last in-house hypertext and hypermedia editing system, Intermedia.

Theorists and critics were becoming aware that hypertext offered – at least potentially or theoretically – new affordances for practices of both documentary and literary reading, most obviously, the ability to follow authored links to related and supporting text and thus also to create texts that were readable as ‘non-linear,’ at the level of what became known as the ‘lexia.’  Scott Rettberg argues for a correspondence between such affordances and the literary practices, particularly the formal practices, of certain late-modernist and postmodernist writers. But it was not until the late 1980s that a few literary practitioners and scholars of literature became interested and seriously invested in computational hypertext. The critic and theorist David Jay Bolter of the Georgia Institute of Technology presented at the first 1987 Hypertext and Hypermedia conference of the ACM. Bolter was, at the same time, collaborating to develop what became Eastgate System’s Storyspace hypertext editing and reading software, one of the first to be made commercially available for personal use by writers in the emerging landscape of personal computing.  One of Bolter’s other collaborators on this project was the writer Michael Joyce, a professor at Vassar (where Ted Nelson also spent some time in the mid-1960s). Joyce went on to be the author, in Storyspace, of perhaps the most highly-regarded and certainly the most-studied literary hypertext, afternoon, a story. (Joyce, 1990)

At Brown, Professor of English and Victorianist, George Landow had been taking an interest in these developments, with both a view to the scholarly potential of hypertextual documentary archives, which he went on to realize and continue to explore in The Victorian Web, and also from a literary theoretical perspective, particularly as informed by postmodern ‘French’ theory. By 1991 Landow was teaching a course on and in hypermedia, using Van Dam’s Intermedia system, and he successfully encouraged Robert Coover, already active on the fringes of hypertext, to undertake a corresponding course with the same software for creative writing. In 1992, Landow published the first version of Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. 

Robert Coover, an important novelist associated with writers characterized as postmodernist, taught creative writing at Brown until his retirement in 2012. Coover was close colleagues and friends with Landow, Van Dam, and Michael Joyce, amongst others in this story. While Coover himself never composed a published work for computational media, he is the most prominent writer to have advocated, strongly and effectively, for the integration of digital media and techniques with writers’ compositional practices. Coover’s study, let alone practice, of narrative, fabulation and the novel ran deep. He understood that just as the novel had taken some four hundred years to be accepted as a predominant literary form, we might anticipate a commensurate history for as yet unanticipated artifacts, and corresponding practices, whose primary impetus was nonetheless the art of language. He saw that computation was already reconfiguring the writer’s relationship with what rapidly became ‘word processing,’ and also with other media, including so-called ‘new media.’ Electronic Writing and its then-potential Literature became the site of his advocacy from the early 1990s, when this coincided with the efflorescence of personal computing, the birth of the World Wide Web, and what led to the inflation of ‘tech’s first ‘Dot-com,’ bubble, later in the decade.

The years 1990 through 1992 saw the publication and institutionalization of lasting, influential interventions: the Storyspace software, afternoon, Landow and Coover’s courses at Brown, Landow’s book on Hypertext, and then, also, Coover’s widely-cited New York Times article, ‘The End of Books.’ (Coover, 1992) Coover’s article represents a moment of realization. Computation would change reading, and thus language art and writing, forever. The material and technical support for the newspaper that published Coover’s article had already changed, but had done so internally, invisibly, in a manner intended to maintain the cultural authority of its established form, that of a newspaper – perhaps even a newspaper ‘of record’ – we were used buy and read. Social media had not yet been integrated into journalistic practices or been able to force newspaper delivery onto the network. Coover, on the other hand, was an established literary figure who already appreciated that the material and technical support for reading and writing would continue to evolve and would, eventually, demand new practices from what we now call ‘content creators,’ including writers.

In the Electronic Writing workshop that Coover first taught in 1991, he introduced a number of talented young writers to Intermedia and later Storyspace. While MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MOOs (MUDs, Object-Oriented) were capturing the speculative world-building proclivities of budding software engineers, Intermedia became a MOO-like entrance way for the Hypertext Hotel under Coover’s guidance at Brown. This was a conceptually architected writing space where some of the young writers that he had introduced to electronic writing worked together with established literary figures, and Coover himself, to create and explore a necessarily collaborative world of inscription.

Once established, the Electronic Writing workshop and George Landow’s courses attracted talented undergraduates and enabled some of them to develop a number of the ‘canonical’ works of electronic literature, chiefly hypertexts. Coover also worked, institutionally, to bring adjunct faculty to Brown with related expertise and, ultimately, to establish Electronic Writing as a ‘genre,’ alongside poetry and his native fiction, in the Creative Writing Program at Brown where he was long-standing distinguished visiting faculty.

Electronic Writing is not, of course, a ‘genre’ in anything other than institutionally specific, pragmatic uses of the term. It is a mode of language art – poetic, fictional, non-fictional, whatever – in the practice of which computational affordances are more or less integrated with compositional processes. It was not until fall 2002 that Brown accepted its first Electronic Writing fellow, Talan Memmott, into the MFA Graduate Program. Coover had been actively involved in the establishment of the Electronic Literature Organization three years prior in 1999. It is remarkable that during the decade before these milestones, Coover and Landow’s mentorship helped to see published important work by Brown alumni, including Mary-Kim Arnold, Lust (1993) and Shelley Jackson, whose 1995 Patchwork Girl is, with Joyce’s afternoon, one of the most cited and studied early hypertext fictions. Coover also hired Robert (Bobby) Arellano to teach Electronic Writing at Brown from 1994 to 2003. Arellano is credited as the author of Sunshine ’69 (1996) “the first hypertext novel written specifically for the World Wide Web.” Finally, with respect to the years before Electronic Writing became a graduate track in Brown’s MFA program, Mark Amerika – who was named a ‘Time Magazine 100 Innovator’ in 2001 – worked with Bob Coover while at Brown and was inspired to create the web-based work of hypertext and hypermedia, Grammatron (1997) as well as playing various crucial roles in establishing and supporting academic infrastructure for electronic literary practices through the Alt-X ‘publishing network,’ particularly a long-running peer-reviewed venue, The Electronic Book Review.

In 1999 the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) was established. The more or less presumed field which it was intended to represent and promote, although unable to fully acknowledge itself collectively, had ‘matured’ to the extent that it had developed factions. Most of these were and are unnamed and difficult to categorize, but one larger distinction was relatively clear. There were divergent inclinations in the direction of cybertext as opposed to hypertext, with respect to differing understanding of what the medium of ‘electronic writing’s practice was. More considered analysis of this situation will be attempted elsewhere in this work. Broadly, cybertext advocated a more genre-agnostic and European perspective on digitally mediated practices and while hypertext underlay a North American attachment to longer-form narrative.

As the 1990s came to a close and just before the Dot-Com bubble burst, funds for what was still a culturally peripheral literary practice could nonetheless be raised, and the ELO established what were intended to be ‘major literary prizes’ in two genres of electronic writing, poetry and fiction. As a co-founder and supporter of the ELO, Bob Coover took an active interest in these developments, and since I ended up the winner of the 2001 poetry prize, my own association with Brown became closer even though, at the time, I very much represented a European and cybertextual approach to these emergent practices, one that was closely allied to innovative, experimental poetics (then somewhat opposed to narrative). I mention this as part of the history of digital literary art at Brown since I later became a central part of this history. However, before I did so, Coover went on to develop Brown’s investment in ways that were more in line with a hypertextual, North American approach. He was also (see below) developing a fascination with immersive 3D computer graphics (associated, in his own work, with the writer’s relationship to cinema) and building on his interest in my work, Coover invited me to Brown in 2004 to work and teach in this ‘environment.’

Bob Coover is remarkable for many reasons, chiefly of course for his intense, maximal, fiendishly thoughtful and extensive writings, but also, in this particular context, for far-sighted openness to developments in, precisely, the programmable and (to a somewhat lesser extent) networked media with which younger writers were then and are now obliged to engage. Coover’s own practices and expertise were decided. He did not deviate in his own work from longform fiction, short story writing and occasional essays and reviews. But he was open to new media, poetic innovation, and, indeed, to practices and theories that had little or nothing to do with his own. He was enabled, thus, to establish ‘electronic writing’ at Brown without predetermining or constraining its practical or institutional evolution.

In the years immediately before Brown’s MFA graduate program in creative writing officially welcomed, each year, an application in electronic writing, two graduate students in the program’s fiction track developed serious interests in digital literary practices. Judd Morrissey (MFA ’02) was a fiction writer with, already, a wide-ranging, innovative practice that led him to produce, with Lori Talley (also a Brown alumna) the extraordinary – especially for its time – Captain, My Name is Captain and a number of other canonical works of electronic literature before going on to a career in related, digitally augmented, performance, along with a teaching career at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Noah Wardrip-Fruin (MFA ’03) was also in the fiction track but went on to a PhD at Brown in Computer Science, and took the lead on the development of an influential, pioneering work of writing for immersive 3D environments, Screen. He then became an authority on narrative games as a Professor at University of California Santa Cruz.

As mentioned above, Talan Memmott, was the first electronic writing fellow to officially undertake a ‘terminal’ (qualified for university-level teaching) graduate degree at Brown or any other institution for that matter. He matriculated in 2002 having already produced a number of canonical works including the groundbreaking, self-reflexive and ironized From Lexia to Perplexia. Memmott now teaches at Winona State University. William Gillespie (MFA ’05) was one of four electronic writers, with Scott Rettberg, to create the important hypertext The Unknown (Gillespie et al., 1998). Brian Kim Stefans (MFA ’06), now Professor of English at UCLA, had composed, before he came to Brown, an extraordinary concrete poetic animated work in Flash, The Dreamlife of Letters.

During these few years, meanwhile, Bob Coover had been collaborating with Andy Van Dam and others who worked at Brown on immersive 3D computer graphics to create a course on ‘CAVE Writing,’ where CAVE stands for ‘Cave Automated Virtual Environment’ and refers to one of a number of early systems for what is now VR (Virtual Reality, in its many forms) and was, at Brown, an immersive graphic environment with projections surrounding the viewer and generating artificial 3D visual ‘spaces.’ Coover enabled graduates and undergraduates to experiment with whatever it meant to work with language – sometime auditory, mostly visual – in artificial visual spaces and saw this, for a time, as an important future for writing – which it may yet be. Samantha Gorman (MFA ’10) was then an undergraduate at Brown and was introduced to VR at this time, while Noah Wardrip-Fruin and others were developing Screen. Gorman, after finishing her MFA, went on to a PhD at USC and, with Danny Cannizzaro, also set up the Tenderclaws studio which produced Pry, a groundbreaking electronic literary work for Apple’s iPad tablet and then a number of seminal VR projects and mixed reality projects culminating, most recently, in a VR game for the Stranger Things franchise. Gorman now teaches at UCSC.

Daniel C. Howe (MFA ’07) was the just-graduating fellow in electronic writing when I came to Brown in 2007. Howe has collaborated with me on many projects after he graduated and is, separately, a considerable figure in the field of electronic writing/digital language art notable for his many works, fine sensibilities, and computational mastery. He is author of the Natural Language Processing suite, RiTa (for Java and Javascript), and teaches at the City University of Hong Kong. When hired in 2007 I became the first faculty member of a university creative writing program to specialize in writing for networked and programmable media, then designated Electronic Writing. I was initially a Visiting Professor, became regular faculty in 2011 and received tenure in 2016, having come late, and somewhat unexpectedly, to an academic career as such.

Both creative writing generally and electronic writing specifically evolved at Brown, the latter under my direction. What was a Creative Writing program in Brown’s Department of English first began to distinguish itself by redesignation as ‘Literary Arts’ in 2002 and then separating out into an independent Graduate Program in spring 2003. A few years later, since faculty also taught undergraduates, the Program became a Department in 2010. I have always been unhappy with the term ‘electronic’ as qualifying literature or writing. For a time I used, informally, ‘writing: digital media’ and have currently and more or less officially settled on ‘digital language art.‘ By about 2019 it was clear that, without special recruiting, finding many young writers who specialized or wanted to specialize in writing with integrated digital practices was difficult, although there was and is a strong inclination amongst early-career writers to undertake cross-disciplinary work and research. By fall 2010 Brown Literary Arts was admitting two digitally engaged writers each year. Nonetheless – and rightly, to my way of thinking – in 2019 while Chair of the Department, my colleagues and I changed the relevant track of the MFA to ‘Digital and Cross-Disciplinary.’ Typically now, each admissions round, Brown admits one digitally-inclined graduate and another with an integrated practice in some other medium. It is worth noting, moreover and particularly since the advent of Chat+Transformer-interfaced generative (so-called) AI, that computation is better-understood as, itself, the medium of a specialist cross-disciplinary practice. ‘Language Art with Computation’ is what we – some of us specialists, that is – now practice.

Whereas before my arrival, Robert Coover had sought out established electronic writers to join the nascent electronic writing track of the MFA, I was inclined to accept what applications presented themselves from earlier-career writers or recent graduates. Many of those who now hold MFAs since my appointment at Brown are still finding their feet but a remarkable number are teaching or exercising influence in various aspects of digital language art. Samantha Gorman (MFA ’10) has already been mentioned, but others making their mark include Ari Kalinowski (MFA ’13), Mimi Cabell (MFA ’13), Ben Moreno Ortiz (MFA ’14), Todd Anderson (MFA ’17), Qianxun Chen (MFA ’19), and (although in an entirely different, if nonetheless language art related, sphere) Kirstin Hayter (MFA ’16). I would name all the graduates of the digital language art track if I could since they are all, as far as I know still committed cultural workers making a significant impact in our shared world.

There can be no doubt that the digital language art community of Brown University’s Literary Arts Program and Department has made a major, disproportionately large, contribution to practice and practice-based research in language art with computation, to writing and reading in networked and programmable media. It will continue to do so.

Hypertext and Theory

with reference to cybertext

Do I need an introductory chapter on my theory of Language Art with Computation, to which I can refer in these sections which are, as it were situated theory?

Text editing, and later Word Processing, offered writers, if not authors, facilities for inputting and rearranging text using computational devices. No new theory of text or composition, let alone of language, was required to emulate what were then the predominant writing machines in technological contexts, the typewriter, or, when writing was remotely driven, the teletype. Moreover, for the engineers of text editing systems there was another motivation: the need to edit programs of formal computer languages that would be stored, compiled, and executed by the very computational devices they were simultaneously developing. There was no expectation, at the time when computational text editing was instituted, that any of the anticipated ‘writing practices’ would change these practices in such a way that might lead to or demand significant changes in humanist theories of composition, writing, or literature.

One of two homographic confusions: ‘language’

If anything meaningful to writing ‘occurred’ as text editing was being reengineered, it was a certain reinforcement of a confusion over the word ‘language.’ As these soon-to-be era-defining software engineers and computer scientists edited the formal ‘language’ of their programs using software that they had just themselves designed, they enacted, in advance of its realization, the scientistic enclosure and effective control of a faculty, language, that nevertheless exceeds anything they conceived of in its name. And they reinvested in a ‘science’ of language that reaffirmed their chief prejudice with regard to its object, namely that this object was contiguous with, if not reducible to, the very formal language at which they were happily editing away.

Then, the Memex story (refer to someone else), Ted Nelson, the rise of the database.

Bring in and refer on to HyperCard as, perhaps, the first imaginable as well as accessible realization of what is still to be the new modality of writing.

Finally, explain that Barthes still presents the potential of a much better theoretical understanding of what writing yet to become, by way of his much better understanding and practice of reading.

When literary critics finally came to point at which was plausible to attempt a reading of hypertext, as a practice that had produced ostensible readable works, they were already taking for granted computational transcription and manipulation of text and were as fascinated as anything in the work with the operations that the computational infrastructure allowed. To the extent that George Landow literally ‘wrote the book’ (and rewrote a couple of times subsequently in perhaps his most faithful Barthesian hommage [nb] [0000 partial infinity of the otherwise readerly text leads to writing, and a more writerly non-closed text]

For Barthes, the lexia was a device for “dividing up the signifier, which is the material text, and following along with it as the analysis unfolds.” (Barthes, 1985, 71)

Each reading unit – or lexia – corresponds approximately to a sentence, sometimes a little more, or a little less. The division into units can remain arbitrary, purely empirical, and without theoretical implications, if the signifier does not pose a problem in itself. … This division has the essential function of defining units through which pass a reasonable number of meanings: one, two, three, four meanings. Because if you dealt with the text paragraph by paragraph, you would lose articulations which would then have to be reintroduced in the heart of these larger units, risking an overload of meaning each time. (ibid., my emphasis)

[Barthes on how he saw what he was doing]

I might have anticipated, in thus breaking up the text, that this discontinuous work would cost me the possibility of grasping larger structures, the ones represented in an intelligent outline of the book. But I was never hampered by this fragmentation, and I found that the structuration of the text functioned admirably even when rhetorical models were abandoned, suitable as they were. One of the discoveries of my analysis is that I was able to “speak” the text, without ever feeling the need to outline it. Thus, there is really no other structure to this work than my reading, the advance of a reading as structuration. In a word, I radically abandoned so-called critical discourse to enter a discourse of reading, a writing-reading [une écriture-lecture]. (ibid., 72-73)

I’m not the only one to distinguish between structure and structuration. […] In fact, one must go beyond the statics of the first semiology […] in order to discover what Julia Kristeva calls a productivity – i.e., a working of the text, a junction, a coupling into the shifting infinity of language. (ibid., 73)

[then, when discussing closure, if I do …]

An exact evaluation of the text’s degree of closure should be made. The classical text is closed, but only partially, and I wanted to find out through a method appropriate to this hypothesis, how the text connects – even in a limited or alienated fashion – with the infinite productivity of language. (ibid.)

Note Drafts: