STORYSPACE READER SOFTWARE

It is often deliberately obscure, encouraging reader disorientation by such means as unexpected changes of the narrative voice and concealment of the links needed to move from one node to the next. This seminal work partakes enthusiastically of the postmodern tradition of literary experimentation.

STORYSPACE READER SOFTWARE

Storyspace, a software environment designed to enable the creation of hyperfiction (fiction written in hypertext), was first demonstrated in 1987, running Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a story. The main subject of this entry, however, is not hypertext in general, but its uses in fiction, and especially in science fiction. The concept then spread through the computer science community, becoming widely known with the release of the HyperCard application for the Apple Macintosh personal computer in 1987 and the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989-1991. Computerized systems which supported links between documents, loosely inspired by the memex, were demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart and Theodor Nelson in the US in 1968 Nelson is responsible for coining the actual word 'hypertext'. The clearest ancestor of modern hypertext, however, is the 'memex' proposed by Vannevar Bush in 'As We May Think' (July 1945 Atlantic Monthly), which would have allowed users to create 'trails' of connected sets of microfilm pages, effectively constructing their own personal links around a set of immutable texts.

The idea of somehow automating the retrieval of information from a common store appears repeatedly in the writings of the early twentieth century, as in the Permanent World Encyclopedia suggested by H G Wells in World Brain ( 1938). It is generally assumed that this scheme is implemented on a computer system this encyclopedia is itself an example of hypertext.

Hypertext can be defined as a way of organizing textual information which allows users to move from one section, or node, to another along various routes, or links.

Storyspace reader