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hypertext.rmit
Trip Report - Hypertext 2000
Dateline: San Antonio Monday June 5 2000
Hot, damned hot. Lost, damned lost. If ever a city provided a topographical metaphor for a hypertext conference then San Antonio and its Riverwalk must be the place. A serpentine, almost subterranean river, overlaid by an indifferent street grid - how many times did people walk the wrong way from a restaurant or bar, or simply struggle to find where they had been the day before? Over lunches I regularly wondered aloud whether or not the street grid was a spatial hypertext and the river a readerly trail (or was it vice versa?), and any mention of riparian rhizomes was met with another bottle of San Antonio Vigilante Porter, a dark local brew that tasted of real beer.
Fortunately, the conference limited itself to several rooms of the rather grand Menger Hotel, birthplace of Texan independence, just to the right of the Alamo (and that's saying something), and home to a rather strange timbered bar where evening conference work was conducted under the gaze of an enormous morose moose. Separating the various conference rooms, much like a medieval moat, was the hotel swimming pool, and when not colonised by marauding tribes of children playing Marco Polo, it proved to be a popular place of respite from the heat, idle intellectual chatter, and whether or not Scott McCloud's opening keynote was exciting, naive, or exciting because it was naive. Face it, no matter what you thought of his proposals and ideas, it was awfully hard not to be enchanted by someone so in love with the rigour and possibilities of their medium - let alone his quixotic trust in the benevolence of a clearly intelligent and articulate vision of just what visual literacy, the internet, and the current dot com colonisation of the citadel ought to mean.
However, for this correspondent - and many others - the conference actually started the day prior to Scott's opening keynote with the Writers Workshop, managed and massaged by the incomparable (and unstoppable) Deena Larsen and Lawrence J. Clark. This year there were a series of four workshops, and participants were divided into two groups so that over a day and a half all workshops could be attended. There were discussions about hypertext theory, definitions, what tools we used, wanted, needed, works in progress, a writing exercise exploring ways of writing and combining written fragments into a hypertext - a general gabfest conducted with vigour and passion. These were all very successful, and go a long way toward maintaining the sense of unity that the literary hypertext community enjoys, in spite of our differences. Indeed, the conference's celebration of the increasing visibility of hypertext literature in the larger hypertext and literary communities ought to be tempered by the realisation that just as our work gains almost academic, and popular, legitimacy new media arts and net.art threatens to displace the history, visibility, and sophistication of what hypertext literature has achieved.
Then there's the other side of the fence, systems workshops being also held on this day, and the first intertwinglings of writers, theorists and literary types (after all systems people are writers and theorists too) happening over coffee, cakes, and cold juice as acquaintances were renewed and friendships formed. For a first time visitor to these conferences it is the combination of systems people with the amorphous catalogue of writers and humanities theoreticians that is the hallmark of this event, and certainly in San Antonio it was clear that if there had once been a line drawn in the sand then that line is certainly shifting, if not yet blown away. Even with the dual sessions, usually scheduled around a systems and a more 'abstract' humanities or literary theme, where attendance tended to follow type and the usual suspects congregated in the usual venues, there were notable exceptions.
Jim Rosenberg's erudite questions for all and sundry, and Kathy Marshall's comfort as a systems developer, ethnologist, and writer spring to mind. Indeed, the "Merging Skill Bases" panel with a combination of writers, programmers and systems developers, role played a hypothetical project building a web site for Darmstadt that sought to combine literary qualities with ecommerce. What was apparent in this panel was not the difficulty in achieving such an improbable marriage, but the conflicting starting points of what was conceived of as 'literary' versus the pragmatics of usability and content. Panels like this ought to be encouraged, and while it sometimes had the tenor of a shotgun wedding it certainly allowed a significant and important sharing of perspectives between us all.
Several papers concentrated on links, most notably Clara Mancini's utilisation of the example of film edits to explore the visual representation of rhetorical tropes realised in link structures, and Susana Tosca's Nelson Award winning introduction of the role of pragmatics and contextualisation to our understanding of links. Mark Bernstein once again demonstrated and entertained with disarming ease his ability to straddle both sides of the line in his brief paper on link legibility and the reader. This presentation managed to suggest and achieve much more than its title might suggest, largely through a masterful combination of slides and asides that make you realise that here is a very fine appreciation of the relation of word, image, screen, and time.
Finally, a hypertext publishing panel covered a great deal of ground, discussing various publishing models that the Web and its commercialisation might now make possible. These largely revolved around problems of just how hegemonic existing publishing houses, and publishing practices, can be in relation to the Web and what alternative but viable commercial practices could now be supported. Interestingly this panel also introduced a strong argument for the legitimation of academic hypertext publishing, and clearly with the de facto patronage that the University offers academics we are well placed to demonstrate the viability and legitimacy of any alternative genres of writing, or publishing systems.
So, apart from my list of favoured papers and sessions, what did I take home from Hypertext 2000? Well, a damn fine Stetson for one thing. Probably more lasting though is an awareness of the difference and distance between what those who build hypertext systems, and those who write what I understand to be hypertext, conceive of as hypertext. While we on the 'literary' side discussed tools, resources and needs it was clear that the community that needed to listen were those developers who write the software that are now, for better or worse, our stock in trade - HTML, graphics and even XML and SMIL authoring programs. In other words what writers mean by tools is considerably different from what systems developers define as tools. This is a hard distinction for us writers to see, and one that might be easier for a newcomer, but from the edges looking in its almost as if HTML and HTTP have become the de facto authoring environment for writers (notwithstanding the immeasurable value and contribution of writing environments such as HyperCard and Storyspace, and the publishing support of Eastgate), whereas systems developers are exploring and building new server architectures that may offer HTTP gateways but are certainly about much more than the sort of servers that most hypertext writers utilise. This should not surprise anyone, given the enormous influence and pervasiveness of the Web - only a handful of years ago hypertext writers could only dream of an environment to write and publish within that was as pervasive as the book and page, and now that we have it we're using it. But for systems developers HTTP has been done and its time to extend and explore and build anew. One community is exploring creative work within primarily a webbed HTTP driven environment, the other is creating new environments.
This distinction sometimes appears to be as simple and redundant as the difference between information, information architecture, and the production of content. After all, it was not coincidence that the ACM Digital Libraries conference was held immediately after the Hypertext conference in the same venue, and that many of the same systems people attended both. Very few from the literary community would have attended the digital libraries conference, but the fact that so many from the systems world find both relevant does indicate the extent to which the problems they are solving are to do with information management and the automatic generation of sensible navigational and semantic links across large and diverse datasets. Largely as a result of this difference, that is between creative content and the management of information, and the lack of low level systems and programming skills on behalf of hypertext writers, an invitation will be extended to a small group of writers to work in collaboration with programmers immediately before the next Hypertext conference (Aarhus, Denmark). This is an exciting possibility where it is hoped that writers can learn more about just what Open Hypermedia Systems offer, and programmers will have their assumptions tested about what constitutes information and a 'good' system.
Hypertext 2000 was a very successful conference, and in the harsh light and heat of south Texas many people found ways to explore and bridge what lies between hypertext as a computational system and hypertext as a medium. It is to be hoped that this difference is recognised, but also preserved, for this conference shows very clearly that from a humanities perspective it is those who explore this difference that produce those works that define and test all our boundaries. There is a line in the sand, but its only a line.
Adrian Miles adrian.miles@bowerbird.rmit.edu.au
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