Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

My next annotation is Scott Rettberg’s All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation. Dr. Rettberg begins by briefly discussing various theoretical social systems. He notes Heidegger, who distinguishes between Da-sein (being in the world) and Mitda-sein (being together in the world). Habermas writes of “linguistically generated subjectivity” to use language to create a subject that is not the self, but subjectively shared with others. Luhmann argues people are not society, but parts of society’s environment (1).

Rettberg’s paper is yet another to reinforce the idea that authorial collaboration is not a new concept. He approaches this from the practical side: Printed books are always collaborations: Not only when authors collaborate but in the sense of multiple people working together to edit, design, bind, print, and distribute. These contributions are less visible: ask someone who their favorite typesetter or editor is and “you’re likely to draw a blank stare.” (1) While recent centuries have been caught in the grasp of the cult of authorship, collectively written works are not new. Examples include the Bible and Homer’s epics. As far as I myself see it, the Bible is an old school wiki that was collaboratively written by 40+ people.

The rise of what Rettberg refers to as the “cult of authorship” has become the center of the culture surrounding literature for the past few centuries (1). The singular author working alone, in isolation from others, on the great works of the Literary Canon is a convenient capitalistic myth to create a marketable brand out of authors and to combat piracy.

In electronic literature, however, Rettberg argues, the collaborative effort is more evident in creation, publication, and distribution due to the lack of a proper electronic literature publishing industry. The role of contributors is much more clearly acknowledged because without them the author has to do it all themselves!

Ted Nelson original conceptualization of hypertext involved a “system of interconnected writing persistent but open to constant expansion.” (2) Nelson’s system was limited due to the centralized nature of the technology he imagined.Hypertext and the World Wide Web are more successful because of its ability to constantly evolve and adapt. Hypertext, specifically electronic literature, is constantly morphing and growing as technology changes alongside of it.

This is true now more than ever. Rettberg cites hypertext author and theorist Michael Joyce’s concept of “exploratory” and “constructive” hypertexts. Joyce explains them as:

Scriptors use constructive hypertexts to develop a body of information which they map according to their needs, their interests, and the transformations they discover as they invent, gather, and act upon that information. Moreso than with exploratory hypertexts, constructive hypertexts require a capability to act: to create, to change, and to recover particular encounters within the developing body of knowledge. (qtd in 2)

Exploratory hypertext, like Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Joyce’s Afternoon, is more in line with the “output” we are so used to from contemporary book culture.

A new idea! Instead of a weekly update of what I am reading for my thesis and the project Toni and I are working on, how about I just blog my research daily as it goes on. Bear with me: I am bouncing between a number of sources so posts will go back and forth between them often. My goal is to upload one per day. In fact, if all goes well the focus of this blog will shift for the time being to my current, in progress, research and writing almost exclusively.

Oh, I will get back to War Prayers soon.

History Lesson
My first entry will be for Jill Walker-Rettberg‘s Feral Hypertext : When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control. Dr. Walker’s paper offers a lot of useful information on two fronts. There is plenty of good historical information about hypertext and many useful arguments for what Toni and I are working towards in our project, which is moving towards a focus on how texts have been, and are, defined and how this effects electronic literature. Walker argues that hypertext before the World Wide Web is “domesticated…bred in captivity” (1). She continues by arguing that hypertext was, however, always intended for individual users. In 1974, Ted Nelson insists that ordinary people need to have access to personal computers. Thirty years before, in an essay for The Atlantic in 1945, Vannevar Bush also argues for this:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Continuing the historical look, Nelson creates the term “hypertext” in 1965. Two years later, Julia Kristeva does the same for Intertextuality. What becomes important here for my own thinking is, as Walker notes, the similarities between contemporary critical theory and hypertext have been pointed out numerous times, including, the work I am most familiar with, George Landow’s Hypertext 2.0 from 1997. Walker is quick to point out, as Landow is as well, that the “relationship between hypertext and critical theory is not that simple” (3).

Walker continues by offering a brief history of preweb hypertext systems like Hypercard and Storyspace:

Though the first personal computers became available in the late seventies, the first home hypertext systems weren’t available till the late eighties. Peter Brown’s GUIDE [8] was followed by HyperCard, a hypertext authoring system that was packaged with Macintosh computers. Soon afterwards, Eastgate’s Storyspace became available, first for the Macintosh and later for the PC. Tinderbox, released from Eastgate in 2001, is probably the tool that most closely follows in the footsteps of these systems, which were very much created in the spirit of Vannevar Bush and the desire for an intimate extension to memory. These hypertext authoring systems allow an individual to organise his or her personal notes and create his or her own self-contained hypertext which can be shared with others by copying it onto a diskette or CD or by emailing it as a single file. While Tinderbox and HyperCard were primarily intended as organisational tools, Storyspace was explicitly developed as a tool for fiction authors.

The Evolution Of The Writerly Text
Distribution of literary hypertext before the World Wide Web still shared many of the characteristics of the bounded text. Like a copy of Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight in paperback, a CD of Shelley Jackson’s Patch Work Girl still restricted readers to a “sustained reading of a self-contained work” (5). The rise of cheaper personal computers and the World Wide Web began to allow anyone with an Internet account to publish on the web, link, and be linked to. This led to what Walker refers to as “feral hypertext,” hypertext that is “no longer tame and domesticated” (1). For my own work, the most important point here is that hypertext on the World Wide Web in general cannot be tamed any longer. Hypertext is very unruly and rather disobedient!

As Walker points out, literary hypertext that has gone, in her words, “feral” demands of the reader “to accept structures that are neither predefined nor clearly boundaried” (2). Collaboratively written works like The Unknown and digital poetry like Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson’s Cruising defy the boundaries of the bounded text. An interactive memoir like Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves Of Girls is an unruly and rather untamed account of growing up told with audio and visual links. After making sure to note that Landow and others have pointed out the differences between critical theory and hypertext while pointing out their similarities, Walker expresses the idea, which I strongly agree with, that theorists involved with critical theory and intertextuality are already arguing that texts are unruly and extremely disobedient. Literary hypertext on the World Wide Web is an evolution of the writerly text. Hypertext that is feral is, as I see it, an interactive expression of the writing of the work on authorship of theorists like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes.

• Margaret Atwood was recently interviewed on NPR about her latest book Moral Disorder.

• ReadySteadyBook has an interview up with Alan Moore about Lost Girls.

• From the July issue of the Iowa Web Review comes interviews with game designer Jane McGonigal and author Shelley Jackson.

• The winter issue of The Quarterly Conversation is now online.

• Starry Constellation has an interview up with Amber Benson.

The Stockpot release party and reading will be held on April 21st at 8PM, room TBA. Stockpot is Stockton’s literary magazine featuring poetry, art and fiction by Stockton students. This year we are pleased to welcome the innovative author Shelley Jackson to campus. Jackson is the author of Patchwork Girl, a feminist hypertext retelling of the Frankenstein story, The Melancholy of Anatomy (Anchor 2002), a book of short stories in which the humors become characters, and Skin a notorious short story tattooed on the skin of 2,000 participants who volunteered to become “words.” Jackson will be reading from her new novel about Siamese twins.