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11/28/2001 Archived Entry: "28-Nov-2001 -- Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature"

Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature -- "Hypertext has been promoted as a vehicle that will change literary reading, especially through its recovery of images, supposed to be suppressed by print, and through the choice offered to the reader by links. Evidence from empirical studies of reading, however, suggests that these aspects of hypertext may disrupt reading. In a study of readers who read either a simulated literary hypertext or the same text in linear form, we found a range of significant differences: these suggest that hypertext discourages the absorbed and reflective mode that characterizes literary reading."

Replies: 3 comments

It's obvious that if you take an existing linear narrative and crudely break it up into hypertext chunks then readers will find the whole experience to be poor, so the study doesn't seem to offer us much of a new insight.

If a piece of literature wants to guide the reader with a continuous external 'voice' under the writer's complete control then hypertext won't provide that immersive environment. It's fragmented, and relies upon the reader constructing their own narrative based on their own conscious decisions.

However, genuinely interactive fiction can easily immerse participants. Anyone who's ever been hooked on a text-based adventure or Multi User Dungeon game can tell you they certainly weren't distanced from it, however disjointed and poorly written much of the text may have been.

Similar issues are coming to the fore as 3D games approach TV/movie quality...

Posted by Matt Round @ 11/28/2001 07:55 AM EST

Disrupting conventional reading modes is exactly what literary hypertext authors are trying to do. But the authors of this study are right when they point out some of the weaknesses of literary hypertext theory; that theory almost never takes into account the fact that the whole text becomes more difficult when the technology (i.e. learning the interface) is difficult.

The key here is the phrase "simulated literary hypertext" in the abstract of Miall and Dobsson's article. They chopped up an existing short story -- they didn't actually test hypertext literature. But the control group also read the text in chunks -- they were linear chunks, rather than chunks linked by inline keywords.

If you printed out a work of literature that was designed for hypertext, readers would probably have en equally hard time of it. A student in my "Writing Electronic Texts" course tried to write a paper on Shelly Jackson's "Patchwork Girl," a seminal work of literary hypertext. She was having such a tough time navigating the text that she ended up printing it all out so she could read it. I think she missed the point. She never wrote that paper, and ended up bombing the course.

The authors of the study set themselves up against George Landow, who's 1992 book, _Hypertext), had a lasting impact on the humanities world, since it came out before must humanists had any experience with hypertext. But Aarseth's _Cybertext_ critiques of Landow's rosy depiction of the "freeing" nature of hypertext, pointing out that the chief value of hypertext is not that it lets us do certain literary things much better, but that it has strengths of its own.

The study has value, not because it is a new argument against hypertext, but because it offers emperical evidence regarding differences between the value of sequential links and in-line textual links, when navigating a text that was designed to be experienced in a set sequence.

I have no empirical evidence, but I did review an interactive fiction version of The Tempest, which was not, in my mind, a useful experiment, but an unsatisfying experience both to gamer and literary reader.

http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/orr/articles/IF/tempest.html

Posted by Dennis G. Jerz @ 11/28/2001 12:56 PM EST

Oops -- in my last post, I meant to say that the interactive version of "The Tempest" *was* a useful experiment. I apologize for not catching the mistake.

Posted by Dennis G. Jerz @ 11/28/2001 04:32 PM EST

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