“Mind the Gap: Reading Literary Hypertext”
Teresa
M.
Dobson
Department of English, University of
Alberta
tdobson@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca
Lately we have been bombarded with prophecies about how hypertext is changing the
literary scene irrevocably. "The book is dead," futurists proclaim, "long live
the docuverse!" Hypertext, they say, makes the postmodern textual ideal a
reality, empowers readers, and mimics the associative thought processes of the
mind.° Amid the discourse on
reading literary hypertext, however, there are few examinations of the behaviour
of actual readers.
A notable and interesting exception to this reality is Jane Yellowlees Douglas's
discussion of how fourteen students in her writing class at New York University
responded to Stuart Moulthrop's Storyspace version of
Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths." Douglas describes the bafflement
expressed by her students when presented with this text:
“Confused by a multiplicity of narrative strands in which they could
encounter a character dead in one place and very much alive and
ambulatory in the next, the readers of "Forking Paths" lacked any
tangible sense of a macrostructure which could give significance to the
elements they encountered in each individual narrative segment.”
(par. 33)
The experience of Douglas's students suggests that readers of literary hypertext,
far from being empowered, are at times placed in a Faustian predicament in that
their choices are often more limited than they appear. Links are not programmed
at random, after all; rather, their presence and their direction are as integral
to the artistry of the work as is content. How might we describe the activity of
reading in such a controlled textual environment? The words of Mephistopheles to
Faustus come to mind: "When thou tookest the book/ To view the scriptures, then
I turned the leaves/ And led thine eye" (Doctor
FaustusV.ii.89-91).
By way of approaching an understanding of how readers experience hypertext, and
what reading strategies they might employ, this paper describes a two-part study
of seventy hypertext readers. Participants read an electronic adaptation of a
modernist short story, Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover." The story was
presented to them in one of two electronic forms, both of which were constructed
using the HyperWriter! authoring system. Subjects in
the control group read the story in a structurally linear format, activating a
"next" link to move from paragraph to paragraph. The hypertext group read the
same text in what I call simulated self-navigating format.° As in the linear text, the story was broken down into its
paragraph divisions and presented as a series of separate nodes; having read one
lexia, however, readers were required to choose between two or three embedded
links in order to progress to another. A simulation of multi-sequential text was
thereby effected. The "Output Report Action" of HyperWriter! enabled the automated collection of reading times and
link choices. Following reading, each participant self-recorded their
observations about the experience of reading the text and completed both a
demographic survey and a questionnaire about their reading preferences.
The first phase of the study involved determining patterns in the transcript
data. To this end, a taxonomy of reader experience was developed and the
transcripts were tagged to enable searches for frequency and co-occurrence of
particular concepts. Searches of the transcripts in WordSmith Tools revealed a high level of disorientation amongst
simulation readers, many of whom expressed frustration with the unresolved
nature of the ending and were puzzled or frustrated by links. Further, several
simulation readers reported a feeling of agitation accompanied by a desire
progressively to increase their speed of reading.
To confirm this preliminary indication that the hypertext readers modified their
reading in some substantial ways, actual reading speeds and link choices were
examined in a second phase of the study. The findings revealed marked
differences in reading strategies between the groups. For example, the hypertext
readers took nearly eight seconds longer on average per section than the linear
readers (linear: M = 35.43 secs; hypertext: M = 43.22), a significant
difference, t(23) = 3.823 p < .01. Reader pace, however, changed dramatically in the course
of reading: linear readers read progressively faster in the first half of the
story (r(9) = -.470, p
< .05) but not the second half; this is reversed for hypertext readers, who
read noticeably faster towards the end of the story (r(8) = .992, p < .01). Their
progressively increased reading speeds in combination with evidence from the
transcripts suggests that the attention of simulation readers was diverted to
the surface features of the text, and that their reading patterns became
increasingly fragmented as they advanced through the story.° Other analyses will be
reported in the paper.
Although it is impossible to project with assurance from this preliminary study,
these findings suggest that hypertext readers do not usually experience feelings
of empowerment, control and freedom, nor do they think of themselves as
"co-authors" or "collaborators." Instead, they struggle at times to become
oriented and are often confused when presented with links. Furthermore, in some
instances readers demonstrate agitation and an inability to engage with the
narrative, resulting in fragmented understanding. Clearly there is a wide gap
between much theoretical discourse and the reality of reader experience as
evidenced in this study.
References
Jorge Luis Borges. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Ficciones. London: John Calder, 1985. 81-92.
Elizabeth Bowen. “The Demon Lover.” The Demon Lover and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape, 1945. 91-99.
Andrew Dillon. “Myths, Misconceptions, and an Alternative Perspective
on Information Usage and the Electronic Medium.” Hypertext and Cognition. Ed. Jean-François Rouet , et al. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996. 29-31.
Teresa M. Dobson David S. Miall. “Orienting the Reader? A Study of Literary
Hypertexts.” SPIEL. 1998. : .
J. Yellowlees Douglas. “Gaps, Maps and Perception: What Hypertext Readers
(Don't) Do.” Perforations. 1999. 2: .
George P. Landow. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1997.
Christopher Marlow. Doctor Faustus. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986. 814-865.