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On hypertext narrative

Published: 29 June 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Annals and chronicles may be the foundation of accounting, but writers of stories and histories have long known that they seldom render a satisfactory account of complex events. In place of a simple chronological list, narrative instead organizes our account in new sequences in order to illuminate the interplay of actors and events. We want hypertext narrative to do things we cannot achieve in print; though we may occasionally use links to introduce variation in presentation or in story; it is now clear that hypertext will most frequently prove useful in changing (or adapting) plot. After discussing the ways in which plot may be varied, I describe the use of stretchtext as a reaction against the perceived incoherence of classic hypertext narrative, demonstrate the limitations that conventional stretchtext necessarily imposes on hypertext narrative, and describe an implemented generalization of stretchtext that matches the expressive and formal capabilities of classical hypertext systems while appearing to be a mere stretchtext and while running within the confines of a Web browser.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HT '09: Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
June 2009
410 pages
ISBN:9781605584867
DOI:10.1145/1557914
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 29 June 2009

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  1. fiction
  2. hypertext narrative
  3. patterns
  4. stretchtext

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  • (2023)Seven HypertextsProceedings of the 34th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3603163.3609048(1-15)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2023
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  • (2022)Is there an Author in this Labyrinth?Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3511095.3531285(91-95)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2022
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  • (2021)On links: exercises in styleNew Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia10.1080/13614568.2021.188969327:1-2(29-50)Online publication date: 11-May-2021
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