Enjoyment in spite of structure
I liked These Waves of Girls in spite of its hypertext structure, largely due to the grace of the writing and the power of the underlying "story" (or rather, the "narrative images"). The hierarchial overview found on some of the pages, with short linear stories from there, were the easiest to comprehend. I found the mix of images and sound to be somewhat discordant, since the text and formatting was so different between pages (and the sound wouldn't play through my plugin). However, some of them were enjoyable. The trip though the glass window of the security door was memorable.
I enjoyed the jumble of memories--short and interweaving. Many of them continue to haunt me this morning. However, I felt this experience was due more to reading them together and having them refer to each other, than due to the actual hyperlinks themselves. I felt the links were too numerous, and the relationship between their source and destination texts was often obscure. This may have been the intent--as if modeling a stream-of-consciousness recollection. But I question its use as an interface. The user is not making a real choice if they have no idea of the consequences of their actions. And each time they make a choice, they have to give up on the thread (often unfinished) that they're currently reading. The user is going to take a single (albiet, perhaps branching and looping) path through the work. The author of a hypertext work does not provide a coherent path, favoring instead a user-constructed experience of naviagation. But fumbling around blindly through a work is frustrating, not enriching. The connections should be evident in content of the work itself, not only in its technical structure.
Jew's Daughter was a very neat trick, playing with the notion of a page. Also a sort of stream-of-consciousness, the page seems to model a current moment of thought. But the writing did not keep me interested. After about 15 to 20 morphs, I bailed.
Miss DMZ was wonderful, my favorite Young-hae Chang work yet. A great story, great music, nice use of *, all brought together into a single piece. Here, I didn't feel I had to overcome the structure to enjoy the content.
posted by Zach @ 2:05 PM
1 Comments:
This is a great thumbnail comparison of the three narrative pieces we read together, pointing up many of the concerns I had wanted to highlight. In some ways, the Fisher-Morrissey-YHCHI sequence represents a declining degree of users' control over their progress through the narrative. In the latter two cases, we have a linear narrative (although Morrissey's is so elliptical that "spiral" or "coil" seem better spatial models than "line."
I agree about the effect of Fisher's hypertext. It's rather chaotic, and even though a moving story does emerge from the fragments we gradually assemble in our minds as we travel through the text--remember that a "collection" provides a significant image--it's more due to the quality of the writing in the lexia than to the architecture of the hypertext itself. You might want to look at an early essay by Joseph Janangelo on "persuasive hypertext." He argues that some hypertexts work like Joseph Cornell's boxes, which were little dioramas in shoe-box sized containers, all assembled out of found objects, often very striking and moving in their collective effect. There are interesting cognitive ramifications for this model of hypertext communication. I'll try to dig up the Janangelo reference.
Tracking the link arrangements in Morrissey's text can be rewarding, and the work does fold over on itself in compelling ways. It's a demanding text, as you point out, and one that I myself couldn't get through in a single sitting (it's as long as some novels, after all).
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