[Apologies: This is not a 'balanced' review of the Hypertext '97
conference, but only, as Ted Nelson would put it, one particular, packaged,
'point of view'. I haven't named all the names I should have or even many
and I have not explicitly acknowledged the herculean efforts of the many
organizers. Readers are referred to the full published conference
proceedings, The Eighth ACM Conference on Hypertext, edited by Mark
Bernstein, Leslie Carr, and Casper Osterbye, New York: ACM, 1997. My
perspective is that of a practitioner of literary cybertext. This piece was
written quickly as a draft towards a (probably shorter) review of the
conference which is to be published in the UK-based periodical (presently a
quarterly newspaper) of 'digitalartcritique' entitled Mute.
"The King is dead, long live the King," was the challenging title of John
B. Smith's opening keynote address at Hypertext '97. It was especially
contentious given the animated and perpetually stimulating presence of Ted
Nelson, uncrowned Emperor of an expanding (ballooning?) Docuverse. From
April 6-11, the University of Southampton, where there is a strong
tradition of hypertext research, hosted the eighth international conference
of the hypertext research community since its first official meeting ten
years ago, chaired by this year's opening speaker. The conference convenes
under the auspices of the ACM, or Association for Computing Machinery, a
no-nonsense umbrella organization offering support and accreditation for
the activities of over 80,000 IT professionals and students worldwide. The
papers given were strictly refereed, yet there was an air of openness,
excitement, and innovation which may be a function of hypertext's
substantive engagement with intellectual and cultural 'emergencies' (its
apparent structural homologies with critical theory, for example), or more
practically, because the conference proper had been proceeded by open
workshops and tutorials, or because there were live demos of new systems,
or because there has, traditionally, been a strong literary thread to
hypertext programmes, or simply because those visionary ironies instilled
in us by a certain living 'literary machine' have not faded.
Clearly, Smith, from the University of North Carolina, was primarily
concerned with the relationship between the hypertext (research) community
and the parallel or splintered groupings more recently clustered around the
World Wide Web. The great irony is, that if the (non-specialist) wired
masses recognize the word 'hypertext' at all this is because the Web has
popularized an actually existing technology which realizes vital but
limited hypertextual potentialities, whereas, historically, many of the
concepts underlying hypertext were outlined by Vannevar Bush in 1945, while
the term itself was coined by Nelson in the 1960s, and the latter's only
half-mocking view is that even hypertext researchers are now working on
conceptual problems that were essentially solved twenty years ago. But as
Nelson put it succinctly in his only formal contribution to the conference–a hilarious
and thought-provoking after-dinner speech–we were all,
including even Bill (Great-Satan or Road-Ahead) Gates, 'blind-sided by the
Web.' He'd rather thought that he, Ted Nelson, would be taking over the
world, sending forth his cohorts from the heart of Xanadu....
Nonetheless, it is fact that the hypertext community has developed working
systems and concepts to go with them which would allow us far richer, more
varied and extensible models of the new information culture than those
which are provided by today's Web technologies. Taking just one example, 3W
links are uncomplex, unidirectional, unintelligent, and unmanaged
(unmanageable?), while the links of many true hypertext systems–mostly
locked away in computer labs or tied to barely accessible 'platforms'–are
richly structured, communicative, open, and extensible. They offer a great
deal to future content-providers but seem only just beginning to be able to
supply. Meanwhile, most of the bells and whistles on the 'cooler' pages of
the Web are cosmetic rather than substantive add-ons to its largely passive,
if immense and tangled, structures. Today's Web interaction is invariably,
perhaps inevitably, 'kludgey,' and sometimes it is positively 'foobar'.
One message underlying the conference proceedings seemed to be: the Web is
not (true) hypertext (as it could and should be) and the Web needs true
hypertext (even if it doesn't yet fully realize this or even remember what
exactly hypertext is). Meanwhile the sixth conference of the 3W research
community was meeting concurrently in Santa Clara, CA. It was impossible to
be in two places at once, except intermittently via the magic of video
conferencing. For one important session, a live link was established,
despite inevitable technical challenges and apparently avant-garde
hypertextual and audiovisual fragmentation. At HT '97 we audited Howard
Reingold's largely anecdotal. 'ain't it a miraculous community-generating
technology (so don't worry about the corporations?)' keynote for WWW6. This
was followed by a live discussion, with alternating transatlantic questions
and answers, as the hypertext node struggled to hold down its bitternesses
and the Webspace admirably suppressed a 'where-it's-at' smugness. On the
hypertext side the panelists were: Ted Nelson, Cathy Marshall (Xerox Corp.,
closing keynote speaker and an important voice of truly imaginative sense),
and Daniel Meadows-Klue (CEO of the Electronic Telegraph, and, perhaps,
HT's commercial accreditation). In the 3W corner: Reingold, Robert Caillaiu
(a colleague of Tim Berners-Lee), Terry Winograd (Stanford), and Ira
Goldstein (Hewlett-Packard).
The wickedly explicit theme of this session, proposed by the chair of WWW6,
was, 'Why bother with research?' Riding the waves of a Web-centric
Internet, caught up in the surfing high, many companies, institutes and
individuals are indeed happy just to 'make things work,' to build and use
anything that will let them beat the tide or enter that crystal tube. But
this is not the first time that effective, albeit mediocre, technologies
have triumphed by default–because they were there, and sometimes for
the very reason of their simplicity or 'slowness': the tortoise, the
qwertyuiop keyboard, DOS. The Web was a brilliant innovation, but it took
over at least in part because it was a protocol that was ready to provide
transparent information exchange within an existing narrow bandwidth. Now
the corporations want to 'push' higher-bandwidth content while the
hypertext community still dreams of enriching our structures. The good news
is that the research will continue and there will also, I believe, be deep
cooperation on both 'sides' of this particular divide. As John Smith
suggested, what the public and the user community sees and talks about
will be one thing–an evolving 'Web,' apparently the same Web we already
know and love–while behind the scenes the actual structures supporting
that interface and its environment may change radically, and incorporate
important contributions from hypertext research.
Indeed, even those technical papers which were not explicitly categorized
as dealing with 'Web Integration and Application' frequently addressed
3W-focussed issues or saw the Web as a potential or actual site of
implementation, of 'Internet distribution' to use a more general term. The
hypertext community is already very much 'out there' building tools and
systems for rich and intelligent linking, for the integration of
hypertextual and hypermedia databases, for navigation by query, for
structural and spatial representation and visualization, for authored or
'guided tours' through the existing Webspace (shades of Nelson's
'transclusion'), and so on. The architectures underlying these enhancements
are currently both involved and various. They require hybrid servers with
intercommunicating software modules tailored for compatibility with current
standards. Java keeps cropping up as an enabling technology which seems at
times to be the glue between new servers and services, dishing out the
goods to the existing, browsing users, that potential audience and testbed
of millions for hypertext's long and deeply held beliefs. But the
fascinating prospect, as Smith pointed out, is a Web turned inside out,
where the open programming environments which are currently tacked onto
operating systems, servers, and browsers enact a quiet revolution, such that
today's relatively simple Web protocols (http) end up inside richer, more
articulate, hypermedia architectures, while the users remain unperturbed by
a paradigm shift that is all but invisible.
Nelson, the inventor of hypertext per se, is a self-confessed
'generalist'. His background was in 'science fiction, movie-making, theatre,
and writing.' He expected to go into media but found that he 'couldn't
leave the rich... combative abstractions of academia behind.' Perhaps, once
more, it is the tenor of his influence which underpins a strand of serious
literary and artistic engagement with both 'Hypertext Rhetoric,' and with
the ever-increasing practice of literary hypertext, which now extends from
scholarly, pedagogic web-building, through hypertext fiction (close on
becoming an established, if problematic, genre), to hyper- and cybertextual
poetics. As this is the area of my own particular concern, I hope readers
will forgive me if I pay it an attention which is disproportionate to its
overall place in the conference.
Two papers in this strand of 'hypertext rhetorics' were accepted into the
main conference program. In addition there was a panel, moderated by Marc
Bernstein (who couldn't attend the conference due to illness) and including
myself, on 'The Future of Authorship'. In the first of the papers, David
Kolb, 'author' of Socrates in the Labyrinth: Hypertext, Argument,
Philosophy (Eastgate, 1994) explored some of the yet unrealized potential
of scholarly hypertext, arguing the need for a 'self-represented
complexity' far beyond the capabilities of current systems, not for its own
sake, but because, he suggested, we require such structures in order to
transfer and extend complex, often traditional forms of argument (such as
are found in philosophy) into the hypertextual Web-centred docuverse. Loss
Pequeño Glazier, webmaster of the most important resource for poetics
on the internet, the Electronic Poetry Center based at the University of
Buffalo, gave a paper which structured
links, historical and theoretical, between the poetics of a tradition of
innovative writing and the specific poetics and rhetorics which are
emerging from hypertextual practice. Essential feedback loops were put in
place and many questions raised. The Future of Authorship panel included
three representatives of the wide-ranging hypertext community in France–Marc Nanard, working on hypermedia design and providing an excellent
overview of the issues, Michel Crampes, developing software agents for
generative hypermedia and interactive editing, and Jean Pierre Balpe, a
poet and editor working on generative fiction, who missed the panel itself
but made the conference later–and one researcher from the MIT media labs–Kevin Brooks, working on the automatic generation of filmed storytelling. On the same panel, I spoke of writing as programming, where the
process of writing itself (which may include the readers' interactions) may
be seen as a 'prior writing,' as inscription prior to performance (in
codexspace or cyberspace or anyspace). An emergent theme of the panel was
the convergence of 'engineered and creative authorship,' further
complicating and problematizing that rightly troubled term with an
uncertain and highly programmed future.
The literary strand of the conference had an addendum in London, where Jim
Rosenberg, Loss Glazier, and Chris Funkhouser read and performed their
(cyber)poetic work at one of the regular London venues for innovative
poetics. A number of figures from the hypertext community attended
alongside the more usual hard-bitten poetics audience. Glazier's reading
was lo-tech but laced with the language poetry of Unix, 'grep'ing across
tribal, national, and disciplinary dialects to 'chmod' files of poems for
our use. Funkhouser, a musician, writer and editor in many media including
the 'new,' was a living 'open system,' a neo-Beat mourning Ginsberg's
passing, chanting and reciting words from the MOO space to extend his own
poetry. Rosenberg is an essential cross-over figure who gave a much cited
paper (by a wide range of even the most technology-orientated researchers)
at the previous hypertext conference. In London, as a PowerBook was passed
from lap to lap in order to demonstrate, hands-on, the interactive
structures which he composes and from which he read, the audience was
treated to the audio channel of his word clusters, simultaneities and
underlying diagrams of syntax. It was a brief and small-scale but important
meeting of convergent galaxies–of hypertext researchers and a few of the
pioneering practitioners of emergent literary forms.
Earlier that day, the conference had been closed by the keynote address of
Cathy Marshall, who also attended the reading in London. With a brief to
'look forward,' Marshall eschewed the temptations of a visionary
perspective in order to review and analyse current and anticipated
research, but also, through an extended 'defensive driving' metaphor (the
Smith System) to set out five practices for 'safer hypertext.' Her talk was
a model of complex and illuminating interaction with the specific inputs
and outputs of the community of researcher/practitioners who are actively
reading her texts. In fact the spin she put on her chosen metaphor was not
overly concerned with 'safety' as a function of defensiveness or restraint.
Rather, she suggested a heightened awareness and openness to whatever is
'out there' and whatever is out here in the 'wet world' which may emerge
when you 1) steer high, 2) keep your eyes moving, 3) get the big picture,
4) leave yourself an 'out,' and 5) make sure the other drivers see you. If
the hypertext community takes her advice, not only will there be an
implosive revolution within the Web, but poets and philosophers will be
welcomed on the way.
Email: cayley@shadoof.demon.co.uk
Copyright © 1997 ebr and the author. All rights reserved. riPOSTe:ebr@uic.edu
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