INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Can you tell us something about the history of hypertext, how the idea was born in the
first place?
Answer
You could say that the notion of hypertext has Medieval origins, in that if you look at
the Talmud or certain other kinds of manuscripts that have comments on comments, you have
texts that open, that refuse to be closed: I can take the manuscript and I can write
something in the margin, then you can make another comment next to that. So, in a way,
printing was what seemed to close in the notion of text in the fashion that hypertext
theorists talk about. Hypertext itself was first talked about, without using the word, by
a man named Vannevar Bush, a scientist who was involved in the building of the atomic bomb
and became an advisor to one of the US presidents. In the 1930s he got the idea, though he
didn’t publish it until after World War II in the Atlantic Monthly magazine,
of suggesting linkage. He thought in terms of microfilm: you might have a screen and you
would be reading something on it and there was a link you could follow and there would be
another screen, and another microfilm. He even imagined that someone might publish a book
which contained nothing but links from previous written texts to others. It would be very
awkward in fact to do it the way he had suggested but with computers it becomes much
easier. The actual word "hypertext" was of course coined by Ted Nelson as part
of a grand scheme that he had for bringing all knowledge into relationship, and he’s
still pursuing that scheme currently in Japan. I think there is actually a difference
between some of the notions that Nelson mentions and some others because his notion of
hypertext doesn’t necessarily demand that the nodes of text be separate one from
another; they can just be referred to in various ways.
Question 2
How would you define hypertext?
Answer
Most of the definitions of hypertext seem to me to start by saying that there is a
contrast between linear text, which follows along in a single order, and text which can be
read in many ways because it consists of pieces or nodes or blocks of text which have been
linked in non-linear fashion. So you could define hypertext as pieces of text which have a
non-sequential pattern of linkage and therefore many possible paths for reading.
Question 3
Do you think that there is some kind of literature which is particularly adapted to
hypertext?
Answer
If you were to study all of the hypertexts which currently exist in the world, probably
the greatest number of them would involve systems of information which are being ordered
and made available. However, the notion of hypertext and the possibilities of writing
would go considerably beyond that. It seems to me there are at least two other ways in
which hypertext could be used, two ways that we can see now and undoubtedly there will be
more, because remember when printing was invented, or paper was invented, no one could
have forecast all the different ways in which it would come to be used. The two ways that
I see are a kind of literature - avant-garde, experimental literary writing - and using
hypertext as a mode of argumentation, and investigation and dialogue, which will probably
involve multiple authors and elaborate means for having the texts keeping track of one
another.
Question 4
What do you think can be made with hypertext in the field of literature? Do you think that
literature is bound together with a linear narrative path or it is possible to have good
literature with hypertext?
Answer
I think it is possible to have good literature using hypertext. However, I do not think
that at this point we quite know how to do it. It is somewhat like inventing a new musical
instrument, where for a time people experiment with the possibilities of the instrument,
the piano for instance, and then someone comes and is able to exploit those possibilities
to make great music. I think we’re in the exploratory phase of hypertext literature
at this point, experimentation with form. Many of those experiments reproduce in hypertext
experiments that were already going on in fiction or in poetry: attempts to break the
unity of a poem, attempts to write narratives which refuse to have a single closure, which
refuse to follow a single path. Italo Calvino would be one example. And there are other
examples in America. It is not accidental, for instance, that Robert Coover, who teaches
at Brown University and who does not himself publish hypertexts but does publish very
experimental, broken up novels, has been one of the leaders in trying to get students to
create literary hypertexts. So at the moment I think there is definitely a possibility. We
haven’t seen it realised yet.
Question 5
Among literary hypertexts you have seen is there someone who you think deserves special
mention?
Answer
I think that the work of Michael Joyce deserves special mention. He was the author of a
program called Storyspace, which allowed him - that is why he wrote the program -
to create, as he said, a novel which reads differently every time you read it. He wrote a
short story called Afternoon, which was the first literary hypertext and has been
quite successful, so successful in fact that I saw it recently for sale in a bookstore
very cheaply, which must offend the publishers! He has since written a longer one called Twilight
which comes on a CD-ROM, and he’s written a number of others which have been
appearing on the Web or on disks in small literary magazines. He has been the most
adventurous, I think. He also has a very good gift of writing good English sentences, so
that his prose is powerful even when chopped up in the hypertextual manner.
Question 6
Do you think there are differences in hypertext for the Web and, for instance, for a
CD-ROM?
Answer
I think there are quite a few actually, given the present state of Web technology. For
instance, on the Web the links which link one page to another, are very visible, as a
result there is a temptation to skip down the page reading only the links, a tendency to
scan. Research has shown that readers seldom read everything on a page. This would be very
frustrating for an author who is trying to involve you in a text, to make you slow down
your reading. There are some strategies to deal with that. One strategy is to make the
links invisible. Michael Joyce does that, for instance. A second strategy is to make the
individual pages very short, so that your attention is grabbed by only three or four lines
of text. That procedure works. But then there is the danger of quickly surfing through
these pages, and then you have the difficulty that the reader cannot keep the pattern in
mind and it is simply like watching slides or changing channels on the TV. You end up with
a situation where the reader is being stimulated by a kind of show of passing forms and
ideas, but they do not integrate into anything. I do not think they have to integrate into
a closed form but they need to have some form or in the long run it becomes just noise.
These are two problems that relate to the Web, as compared to a CD-ROM, where the author
has far greater control. Another feature of the Web of course - and this is one which
hypertext theorists would rejoice about, though on the other hand it causes problems - is
that the reader can at any moment back out and follow a link to an entirely differently
site far away. The reader can simply move, so that the experience that you have designed
for the reader becomes a momentary passage into something else. Now, that loss of
authorial control over what the reader experiences is something which hypertext theorists
rejoice in because it opens the text to unexpected creations of meaning. It opens the text
to new ways of reading which juxtapose unusual things. There is a very fine balance,
though, between opening up the text and allowing the text to become flat because now
anything can follow anything. So although the author gives up a certain amount of control
- and it is fashionable to say that the hypertext does away with the author - in fact the
author is important. It needn’t be one person but the author has to have some control
over the text so that it can maintain interest and some structure. We have to find out how
to create the new kinds of structure, which will be a problem.
Question 7
Going from hypertext to hypermedia, the fact that you can marry with the text also images
or short pieces of video or sound, does it change somehow the way of writing?
Answer
I think it will. If you think back to photography, which was invented in the
middle of the 19th century, the first photographs could not be printed - that
came in the late 19th century. For instance, John Ruskin, in his books about
Venice, used daguerreotypes, an early form of photography, and then made etchings based on
the daguerreotypes. Later of course we were able to print photographs. That means that the
illustrations in a book take on a new kind of immediacy. Now we can have movies on a
single page or sounds, and we can have images which are themselves links to other images.
Surely, this will mean that whole new level of complexity and a whole new level of
possible relationships opens up for the author. Yes, I think that will have a profound
impact.
Question 8
There is a sort of literary genre of hypertext which seems very widespread, which is that
of autobiography or writing personal Web pages. Do you think this kind of autobiographical
hypertext writing has some particular features which deserve attention? Do you think it
changes somehow the way we can write about ourselves?
Answer
I think it has. It is not so much the hypertext as the fact that anyone can publish on the
Web, that everyone has a printing press, as it were, and therefore can make their life
available. What the hypertext then adds is the ability to add pictures, to quickly write,
and change quickly if need be, and to produce fairly good visual effects without too much
effort. Although not all Web pages with personal autobiography have such good effects.
There is another thing involved: if you look at literary hypertext, even if published on
CD-ROM or disk and therefore rather incomplete in themselves, you see that autobiography
often shows up. Not necessarily that the story or the characters are autobiographical, but
rather that the author inserts autobiographical segments which you may find your way to.
In one hypertext story called Woe by Michael Joyce you suddenly find yourself
reading something that says: "Well, I am writing this at 2 o’clock in the
afternoon on a Macintosh computer. It is a very cold day and I’ve been writing since
9 in the morning... ". Suddenly you have the author, truly or not, bringing in an
autobiographical element. It is very tempting. I have found myself when writing hypertext
putting in a few self-reflections questioning the form of what I was writing. It is a move
which seems very natural because you can always link off in different directions. I think
the other attraction of the Web, and I’ve seen this when my students write
autobiographical things, is the feeling that what you do is suddenly available to a very
large audience. Perhaps not too many people will see it but it is available. It is not
like a personal diary which you keep or even something which you make to show your parents
or your fellow classmates; it is open and that takes on either solemnity or a sense of
fun, depending how you do it, which can be quite stimulating.
Question 9
Coming to the second aspect of hypertext you mentioned, the use of hypertext for
argumentation. Can you tell us something about this?
Answer
This is also something which has not been explored but it is of great interest to
me. It seems to me that hypertext offers a possibility to present very complex structures
of argumentation in ways that might potentially be clearer than you find in a linear book,
because you can make the relationships between the parts of the argument by direct linkage
of various kinds and you’re not constrained to put the argument piece by piece and
hope that the reader remembers on page 50 the important point that was made on page 25.
You can in fact link page 25 to page 50 and your reader can go back and forth directly. So
there is a possibility that complex formal structures of argument could be more adequately
expressed in hypertext. It is also possible that comments and questions and additions to
such forms of argument could then be directly attached, in which case you would begin to
develop a dialogue which would not simply be in the form of I say this, you say that, I
say this, you say that. But rather your comments would be attached to portions of what I
said, and so we might have many streams of dialogue coming off the argument, and gradually
a whole network would develop, which might be rather hard to follow because it would have
many paths, but that network would include a whole debate about complex argument,
counterarguments, and presumably would also include mapping that would tell you what was
going on in such a collection.
Question 10
You have written a hypertext, Socrates in the Labyrinth, in which you discuss this
problem of using hypertext in philosophy, in argumentation, and of course this hypertext
has arguments within it, so what is your experience of using hypertext in order to arrange
and organise an argument?
Answer
Actually I tried to do it in various different ways while I was writing the text.
Partially that is because I learned as I was going along. Partially it is because
deliberate experimentations were made, and I also included some smaller texts which show
various forms with the larger ones. My experience was that it is good to break up the
arguments so that it is not all presented in a single block, but that it is not good to
break it up too much. If you tried, for instance, in a complete argument to give each step
of the argument in one little block of text, it would be too hard for the reader to keep
everything in mind. So what I decided was to give a chunk of argument, maybe half a page
or several paragraphs, which were best read together, and then to link that in various
directions to comments, background, previous and subsequent arguments, so that there is a
certain judgement you need about how it can be best presented.
Question 11
Sometimes when this problem of using hypertext in philosophy is discussed, there is a
tendency to think that hypertext is useful when there is a sort of deconstruction of the
linear form. What is your opinion about this relation about hypertext and deconstruction?
Answer
It is a complex issue. You could summarise by saying that in many ways hypertext shows
that the things which deconstructive literary theorists and philosophers have been saying
about texts are true. It is shows that texts are open, that they cannot be completely
closed, that they cannot be completely dominated by the author, that meaning has a certain
contingent way of arising, so that it is not totally under the control of anyone, reader
or author; those things hypertext demonstrates very rapidly. But it is also true that
hypertext stands somewhat opposed to some of the things that are said by deconstructive
writers because, in fact, a hypertext is a network, a finite set of relationships; it is
something made, it is an artefact. I think many of the authors who sing the praises of
hypertext as somehow "the native language of deconstruction" are making a
confusion. They are forgetting that there is no pure text, that any kind of presentation,
any kind of writing, brings the sort of general textuality they are taking about down to a
concrete mode of presentation. There is a dream, after all, of total freedom. There is a
dream of a permanent avant-garde situation in writing, but I think the flag of hypertext
seems like something that might lead you in the direction of that dream. But only in the
direction: the dream is impossible by itself.
Question 12
Do you think there is some possible use of the idea of hypertext, the idea of this kind of
linking and putting in relation different scattered pieces of information outside the
field of literature, of writing? Do you think hypertext can also be seen as a kind of
model or metaphor in other fields?
Answer
I think so. If you think about hypertext as linkage which is non-linear and also
non-hierarchical - although you can build a hypertext which is hierarchical, you can build
a hypertext which is purely linear, the problem is that you cannot keep it that way, it is
going to have other links, it is going to move out - if you think about that image of
non-linear, non-hierarchical linking, and forms that can be created but which cannot
dominate the field of writing because other forms could be created out of the same pieces
of text, that idea can be transferred. Here’s an example. Many people complain,
especially in American but I think also increasingly in Europe, about suburbs and suburban
sprawl. We tend to think that we have a very concentrated historical city core surrounded
by a flat area which has houses and factories and malls just kind of scattered about with
no order. This lack of order is felt to be somehow inappropriate. But you might try
reading the suburbs as a hypertext. You might say: Do not try to impose on the suburbs the
old hierarchical kind of order, look for linkages, see the economic links that go among
pieces of the suburbs, see how people make lives, especially in America, by using their
car to make links from one activity to another. See how a community is created which is
not a community of people who live in the same neighbourhood but a community of people who
are linked by car, by telephone, by e-mail. A disconnected, discontinuous community but
nonetheless a community. So this idea of linkage without hierarchy and linkage that has
many possible patterns at the same time may be a useful way to think about the kind of
physical civilisation which tends to be growing up in a dispersed fashion rather than the
concentrated, hierarchical city.
Question 13
As a university professor, how do you use the new media and hypertext with your students?
Answer
I’ve used several kinds of media in my classroom. I am teaching a philosophy course
after all so I am trying to encourage discussion and interaction and I do not have huge
amounts of information to present. I do not have to talk about the whole civilisation of
Greece; I want them to concentrate on certain texts of Plato. I will send them to the WWW
to get information. I have used e-mail, many of the teachers in my college do, we set up
e-mail discussion groups and demand that the students send e-mail to everyone else in the
class once or twice a week, commenting on each other’s work. You can also use
newsgroups, Usenet newsgroups, which provide ways for students to comment on other
students in a rather structured, hierarchical manner. I have experimented further with
actual hypertext. I’ve done it in two ways. One is to use the program Storyspace
because it allows you to make comments in many directions and to have a map of what is
going on, what is linked to what. It works very well, if the students can use the program.
But the program is not terribly easy to learn, especially for students who are not
familiar with hypertext structures. I’ve used that in Greek philosophy mostly to have
students comment on some texts and on other students’ comments on the texts. I think
I’ve thought of a way to do that on the Web using forms but I am still working on
that. I’ve also simply offered students the chance to write hypertexts instead of
writing normal terms papers in the classes. And finally I’ve taught courses
specifically about hypertext where that is what the students do, write hypertexts of
various kinds. My experience at the moment is that if the student is offered a chance to
write a hypertext term paper in a course which is about something else, Greek philosophy
or philosophy of art, mostly they will not take the opportunity. They already know how to
write term papers; they are very busy; they do not want to take on the extra burden of
learning how to do the hypertext. They will do e-mail because they are quite used to that
and they’ll do things with the Web, but Web authorship is a little more difficult.
But in the class which is specifically about hypertext the students get very excited and
they are quite willing to devote themselves to it, usually in a fairly literary fashion.
There we get a lot of participation and considerable invention, and since we’re all
learning together and there are no fixed rules, I am not quite the teacher in the same
way, and that is very refreshing.
Question 14
What kind of advice would you give teachers on how to use new media and hypertext in their
classroom work, not only at the university level but also in secondary school?
Answer
You need at least two qualities. First of all you need reliable technology. And you always
have to be prepared for it not to work, unfortunately. And you need software that does not
have too steep a learning curve, something that the students can learn fairly quickly. On
the other hand something that the students can be creative with. That is one reason the
Web is good; once they’ve learned basically how to do a Web page, they start finding
new ways to do it and they go out onto the Web and bring back various things which will
adorn their pages; it is open and it encourages creativity. So I would look for
reliability, not too difficult to learn, but openness to allow the students their own
creativity to emerge. The worst kind of new media are the simple drill type situations
where you simply use the computer to make the student repeat things. That is been fairly
well proven not to work, unless it is used only as a component of a more open and creative
style.
Question 15
One of the problems we have with the use of new media in education is the problem of
teachers. It is often said that the students know more about the new media than the
teachers. What is the situation in the United States, and what do you think can be done to
encourage teachers to use the new media in education?
Answer
It is a difficult problem in the States too. I think it is true that many of the
younger students do know much more than the teachers, particularly students about 12 to 13
years old, not yet in university, who seem to have grown up with computers in a way that
even people three or four years earlier did not. My experience is - and I think this is
pretty general - that many teachers use word processing and perhaps e-mail and perhaps
they surf the Web for various purposes and they are comfortable with these things, but it
is not clear to them how they would use them in the classroom because they are mostly
receptive activities or versions of things that were done before in other ways. What
we’ve found is that the best way to encourage the teachers to experiment is to
provide examples and to show what other people perhaps in the same school or nearby or in
another university are doing, so that teachers can imagine. They won’t necessarily
duplicate the examples, but they’ll begin to think: Oh! Maybe I could find a way to
do something like that. The difficulty of course on the university level is that teachers
have different subjects and there aren’t always examples to be found in some
subjects. They are more in the sciences, for instance, and fewer in literature, and very
few in philosophy. So teachers can shrug and say" Well, it works over there but it
won’t work here. We need to work on that by providing examples and better
communication of examples from other locations. As for motivation, I think you have to
deal with the question of what the teacher gets out of it. There is someone who has done a
great deal of work on hypertext in the classroom and he said: Using new media in the
classroom does not make the teacher’s task easier but it makes it much more fun, more
spirited, and much more satisfying. I think that is the kind of motivation we have to work
with. Not that you’re going to ease the burden of the teacher but rather that
you’re going to inspire and encourage and give the teachers more fun and spirit in
what they are doing.
Question 16
In our program we have Web surfing . Do you have some Websites that you could suggest as
interesting to visit during Web surfing and can you also tell us something about the
Website on which you work with your students and where material of your students is
located.
Answer
If we’re thinking about hypertext, the two Websites that come to my mind are
actually personal homepages. One is the personal homepage of Stuart Moulthrop who teaches
at the University of Baltimore and the other is the homepage of Michael Joyce at Vassar
College. Both of those are interesting because they connect to essays or texts written by
those people, who are both fine theorists and writers, but also because they have many
links from those pages to other hypertext-related Websites. I think those would be good
starting points. As to what I’ve done with my students, I’ve created on the Web
a little thing called the Bates Hypertext Archive, which is simply a place to put some
student works and a bit of my own which seemed to me to be worth putting on the Web. Most
of the material there has been transferred from the program Storyspace, which
allows you to construct more complex linkage than is easy to do on the Web. As a result,
there is some awkwardness in the Web production of the pages, but by and large it is OK.
What you’d find there are three or four "fictions" or short stories written
by students and also a link to a site of students in a philosophy of art class - quite a
large class. I asked the students to go out onto the Web and find sites related to art -
paintings, sculpture, architecture - and write reviews of those sites. So I have several
hundred reviews, typically a paragraph or so, written by these students, purely their own
opinion, about these various sites, and there is a link to the site with each review. Some
of the reviews are very fine, some of them are not. Some of them are quite insightful. But
it was an attempt to allow the students to have a voice and to have a fairly simple way of
constructing something, because we were able to post the reviews without too much
difficulty and it did not require the students themselves to compose a Web page. That is
an example of another thing you could do. Given that you’ll probably have some
students who know something about Web construction, one of the best ways to involve
students is to have a common project - it allows them to learn from one another. Have them
create a Website or a portion of a Website that relates to the material of the class or to
some project that the students are working on. You could even let them define it to some
extent. One of the things that is on the Website, for instance, is something some students
did last spring. They had to break into groups of three or four and decide on a Web
project and create it. One group did a project on the worst things they could find on the
Web. Another one did a guide to college, things the administration doesn’t want you
to know, and so forth. So you are getting people to create. It doesn’t have to be
enormous but they learn a tremendous amount and they learn from one another.
Question 17
It sometimes seems that virtual reality is mainly used for fun at the moment. Do you think
virtual reality can also be used as a way of communicating?
Answer
I think so. It is a bit like writing personal Web pages. Imagine at some future date I
have all sorts of computer-related tools, and sufficient bandwidth. I could create a
little mini-world, not a textual page, but a sort of mini-world like a room which you
could enter, in which there would be symbols and images which I though were me or perhaps
were my view on a certain matter. I could send that to you and you could enter it. And
then you could comment on it by altering some things in it or perhaps linking it to other
things, creating a second room. So it might be possible to have a mode of communication
which was in a sense the creation of small simulated environments, and then a mode of
commentary which was the alteration of those environments. Presumably, you’d want to
have both the original and the altered version available, as in a hypertext where you can
link things, you do not ever have to erase anything. You can substitute something for it
but the original remains linked there. You could imagine virtual reality being used as a
medium of expression and communication, perhaps not so immediately as a method of
argumentation but as a method of presentation. I think it is important to go beyond
thinking of virtual reality as a commercial product which will be simply something you
absorb - you go into a Disney virtual reality or a Hardrock Café virtual reality and you
are completely dominated by what they want to sell - and think of virtual reality rather
as the possibility of having personalised worlds which are not ways of escape but ways of
communication.
Question 18
What do you think of the discussion of the use of virtual realities, of new world
structures which are made not only of words but also of images and three dimensional
objects? People are discussing whether we are creating new forms of art and even a new
concept of aesthetics.
Answer
I think at the moment it is difficult for us to foresee because these new tools open so
many possibilities and it is not clear what are the best ways or even what are the many
possible ways to use them. I suspect that just as there is no one form of art which is the
print form of art: there is poetry, there are novels, there are diaries, many different
things. So too virtual reality will end up spawning different kinds of art which will have
quite different aesthetics. I think in some ways the kind which creates the most
interesting problems for us is the kind where you would have abrupt juxtapositions of
images and spaces. You might imagine for instance a virtual reality room that looks
something like the library where we are now, and I go through the door and I am in the
Baths of Caracalla, and then I go through another door and I am at my home in America. And
this juxtaposition, this abrupt transition, could be used for artistic purposes. The
difficulty is to use it in a way which does not become boring. The problem of boredom
comes when the reader or the experiencer senses that: "When I go through the next
door, absolutely anything can happen." That is exciting but there is no playing with
my expectations. There is no ability then to surprise me because I expected something
else, and so your artistic tools become limited oddly by the fact that you have now
allowed absolutely anything to happen.
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