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Shower Curtains of the Mind

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The Authoring Problem

Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

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Abstract

Among certain veteran hypertext experimentalists, the words shower curtain stand as shorthand for what may be the most profound problem in multi-cursal authoring: visualizing and mapping the work. The reference is to Deena Larsen’s Marble Springs, a sprawling, densely intertwined labyrinth of poems and stories originally developed on Apple’s HyperCard platform. To keep track of the project’s burgeoning complexity, Larsen built a physical network with notecards and string, taped to the most capacious household surface she could find. (The object now resides in the Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.) Larsen’s famous curtain calls to mind the evidence boards endemic to police procedural fiction, and perhaps also the densely inscribed dens of the mad criminals in those stories. These associations remind us that “non-linear writing,” as Ted Nelson famously defined hypertext, breaks the existing laws of discourse, bringing unique problems for authors and designers of authoring systems. This chapter will review some of the solutions the writer has encountered in three and a half decades, including the directed graphs of early hypertext systems such as Intermedia, NoteCards, and Storyspace, the revolutionary but unrealized 3D innovation of Apple’s HotSauce experiment, and the current vernacular of Twine. The chapter will draw on work in information science from Halasz, Horn, Marshall, Bernstein, and others, as well as discussions with hypertext authors and Chris Klimas, the main developer of Twine.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Deep-form narrative” is offered here as my own coinage, though of course no term is ever new. I am indebted to N. K. Hayles’ thinking on “deep and hyper” cognitive styles [2] and to Jason Mittell’s notion of “complex television” [3] and Richard Grusin’s ideas about “radical mediation” [4]. Readers should also see more recent work on “deep narrative,” e.g., Phoebe Tickell’s recent Medium post in this line [5]. There are many ways to talk about a supposed increase in narrative complexity; this is my name for the phenomenon.

  2. 2.

    All rules are proved by exception, and there are many here, perhaps the most common being URLs visible in a Web browser. Storyspace, to which we are coming, included a reader mode that showed its graph, a feature used by numerous authors, including Shelley Jackson in Patchwork Girl (1995) [8]. This mode remains accessible in Eastgate's Tinderbox authoring system. With the emphasis on user-generated content in the second Web era, these exceptions arguably became rare.

  3. 3.

    Marble Springs is a hypertextually linked collection of poems that capture the experience of women, from various social strata, races, and nationalities, in a Colorado town during the nineteenth century. As a work of what was called “new media,” it consists, as Lev Manovich has said, of “one or more interfaces to a database” [15] p. 37. Larsen’s various shower-curtain assemblages might be seen as authorial interfaces to her literary database.

  4. 4.

    Rosenberg's remark led to an important exchange with the hypertext author and editor Kathryn Cramer, on the Usenet forum Ht-lit in 1994. Rosenberg has shared the transcript with me. Unfortunately, the forum has not been otherwise archived.

  5. 5.

    Like Marble Springs, Victory Garden is a network of stories involving people in or attached to a particular place, the imaginary American college town of Tara. Its occasion is the outbreak and prosecution of the first Gulf War in 1990–91. The work includes approximately 1,000 lexias 2,800 explicit hyperlinks, and (as we’ll see) a quantity of implicit or emergent links that is difficult to calculate.

  6. 6.

    An Addendum addressing the design differences between the 1991 and 2022 versions of Victory Garden appears at the end of this chapter.

  7. 7.

    The images in this paper were produced on an iBook G4 that left the factory in 2004—as the poet says, long may you run.

  8. 8.

    At least one authoritative reader of the original Victory Garden, Alice Bell, seems understandably to have chosen the map. See her Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (2010) [21].

  9. 9.

    Unsure if the spelling error should be attributed to the implied speaker of the passage or my younger self, I have corrected it in the new version.

  10. 10.

    Though both afternoon and Victory Garden use the Page Reader, explicit paths are not as heavily emphasized in the earlier work, so the “wave of returns” is better realized there.

  11. 11.

    Postman offered that phrase as a formula for broadcast television—compare the famous Monty Python catchphrase, “and now for something completely different.” It seems suggestive for Web hypertext as well.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the editors of this book for their cross-disciplinary generosity. Much credit is also due to Dene Grigar and her colleagues at the Electronic Literature and The Next. Appreciation to Matthew Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland for the crucial photograph.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, USA

    Stuart Moulthrop

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  1. Stuart Moulthrop
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Correspondence to Stuart Moulthrop .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bournemouth University, Poole, Dorset, UK

    Charlie Hargood

  2. University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    David E. Millard

  3. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Alex Mitchell

  4. Hochschule RheinMain, Wiesbaden, Hessen, Germany

    Ulrike Spierling

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Moulthrop, S. (2022). Shower Curtains of the Mind. In: Hargood, C., Millard, D.E., Mitchell, A., Spierling, U. (eds) The Authoring Problem. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05214-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05214-9_15

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-05214-9

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