The recent trajectory of the readings has been design fiction, partly to seed some other ways to go about making works that use evidence, and partly to relax the ways we might choose to judge what counts as ‘real’. Then the Bush and Nelson as precursors to the World Wide Web that have design fiction qualities about them, but which have also been very influential in themselves in how technologists have thought about the purpose of the machinery they were making. If you like these were ‘fictions’ that directly informed the design of the Web. From here we entered more specific hypertext theory. This is because a) hypertext is a networked writing structure, b) it predates the World Wide Web, c) many of its ideas, practical and theoretical, provide an excellent way to approach how to theorise the Web not as technologists but as people who want to be able to narrate things (us). This next lot of readings continues this, making some of the hypertextual things around narrative (shape or structure, and reading) more visible – I’ve skipped the material about what it is to write in this way, so that hypertext’s relation to what I’ll characterise as our ‘normal’ understanding of story can be more strange. If you like it is a way to help show the point of hypertext and the differences to what came before.

So, this weeks reading, are then about narrative structure and reading.

Key Readings for the Week

Extracts from Landow, George. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print. (PDF)

This is the easiest read of this weeks lot, and they are all quite difficult (I’m still sick, and if I’m able I’m going to try to dig out an old book from last century that is an introductory reader in this area – Ilana Snyder’s Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth.)

Extract from Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books — Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print. (PDF)

Optional Extras

Marie-Laure Ryan is one of the more prolific writers on interactive literature, fiction, and so on. She has a narratology background so the work is very strongly informed by those areas of literary theory that concentrate on narrative. This is really good work, and worthwhile if only to skim to see her maps of different narrative structures.

Extract from Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Open WorldCat. Web. 15 Aug. 2013. (PDF)

Finally, if the Douglas tweaked your interest and you’re a lit orientated student, then the next chapter is worth a read too:

Extract from Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books — Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print. (PDF)