“Towards a Rhetoric of Hypertext: A Case Study in
Adaptive Literature”
Licia
Calvi
Technical University of Eindhoven
l.calvi@tue.nl
In hypertext poetics, great importance is assigned to the notion of a
decentralization of the authorial voice [7]: the author is said to gradually
loose her power and authority within the hypertextual work, whereas the reader
gains more centrality and control over the text and over the ways to navigate it
and ultimately to construct the narrative.
By introducing a distinction between shallow text
(i.e., what appears on the screen, and therefore what the reader actually reads)
and deep text (the encoded text that generates what
will appear on the screen), Lughi [8] ultimately reduces the space of
applicability of the above-mentioned construct: the reader's freedom is heavily
conditioned and determined by the author, whose space of activity lies at the
level of the deep text. So the author, by acting on and controlling the deep
text, eventually limits the reading possibilities offered to the reader. This is
possible because (and I may add, if) the author directly acts on the code behind
the shallow text. This intervention may take different forms and open up a wide
space for the author's experimental efforts and creativity.
In this open space, adaptive hypermedia (AH) may play a significant role.
So far, adaptive hypermedia have mainly been used as a didactic tool, i.e., as a
tool to develop on-line educational systems, despite the potentially wider
spectrum of systems they could be applied to (see in [1]). A restriction that
adaptive educational systems soon showed was their application domain: most
systems were used to teach computer science related or anyway scientific
disciplines. Attempts at extending this limitation have been made, for instance
by using adaptive hypermedia to teach foreign languages [2]. But the results
obtained were not always so promising for the intrinsic difficulty at modeling
such a domain: at a linguistic level (syntax and semantics), at a domain-related
level (in the perspective of a situated learning approach to language learning),
and at a level that was focusing on the intersection between the previous
two.
What has been neglected so far is however the possibility of using AH for the
humanities, again not just as a didactic device, rather as a medium to promote
advances in or to be applied to humanities disciplines. Although, recently, a
research trend has emerged which has pointed out the potential advantages of
exploiting adaptive methodologies to the delivery of cultural information, which
have a direct influence on the way in which cultural heritage information is
approached, accessed and fruited, not as much has been devoted to promote the
production of artistic artifacts by means of AH. At a closer look, the
contamination of art and technology is historically older than what the last
years of Web explosion may seem to suggest: at the end of the nineteenth
century, for instance, Rimbaud's fascination for photography was influencing his
poetical style in determining which words to select, how to construct sentences,
and how to juxtapose them in a visually effective way (see, for instance, in
[3]). In this sense, AH should be considered as the canvas whose characteristics
can influence the final artistic result in a peculiar way. A first step in this
direction has however already been made: it is the system developed by Kendall
and Réty [6], the Connection System. This system allows to write literature,
both poetry and fiction, adaptively.
On the basis of the previous discussion, this paper intends to pursue a dual
goal: on the one hand, it intends to analyze a number of existing digital
hyperfictions to extrapolate their characteristics, to investigate the amount of
experimental composition and the kind of creativity that they allow to authors,
to stretch and explore the limits both in the language and in the tool (the
hypertext), in order to elaborate ultimately a rhetoric of hypertext. On the
other hand, on the basis of the results obtained by this analysis, the paper
will present an extension of the AHA! system [5], as augmented to include these
derived elements. AHA! is an application developed at the Eindhoven University
of Technology to deliver adaptive Web-based courses. Up to now, it has been used
to design and develop educational courses (mainly in the field of Computer
Science, but also in the Humanities [3] and an experimental course in CALL) and
only recently for e-commerce applications.
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