1. DIKULT 103: DIGITAL GENRES
Hypertext, Part 2
Lecture 4
Jan 28, 2016
Scot Rettberg, Professor of Digital Culture

2. Nonlinearity and Hypertext Structures

3. Nonlinear writing refers to (a) a writerly activity and (b) a specific type of written document. The first meaning relates to the strategy of composing a text in a nonsequential way by adding, removing, and modifying passages in various places of the manuscript rather than producing it one piece, from beginning to end. The second meaning refers to documents that are not structured in a sequential way, with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Ensslin, Astrid. “Nonlinear Writing”
Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media
Image: DIGRA 2015

4. Rather, their macrostructure follows an associative logic, which assembles its composite elements (paragraphs, text chunks, or lexias) into a loosely ordered network.
Ensslin, Astrid. “Nonlinear Writing”
Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media
Image: DIGRA 2015

5. The receptive counterpart of nonlinear writing is multilinear reading
The receptive counterpart of nonlinear writing is multilinear reading. As reading is a temporal activity, it inadvertently follows a a linear trajectory. Whereas in linear writing this trajectory tends to follow a prefabricated path with relatively few diversions, in non-linear writing it adopts a meandering, crisscrossing fashion. Readers of nonlinear writing will never read the same text twice but will alter their reading paths during and between reading sessions.
Ensslin, Astrid. “Nonlinear Writing”
Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media
Image: DIGRA 2015

6. The result is an array of different mental images, or readings, of the text’s content, and multiple rereadings are required to construe a reasonably reliable impression of the textual meaning in the reader’s mind. . . Another result of nonlinearity is a significant degree of intersubjective discrepancy and disagreement between different readers of the same text, which poses both challenges and innovative potential to classroom discourse and critical debate.
Ensslin, Astrid. “Nonlinear Writing”
Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media
Image: DIGRA 2015

7. Storyspace is most noted for its extensive features for linking text nodes and for visualizing a text’s internal and linking structure There are a number of specialized tools for linking the nodes and controlling the linking structure, such as links that encode one-to-many relations. Most importantly, the guard field feature suggests a heavy usage of links that will only become visible after the reader has fulfilled certain conditions, such as visiting certain nodes a number of times.
Rau, Anja. “Storyspace”
Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media

8. A linking strategy is the conscious use of hypertextual links in order to attain narrative and lyrical effects. There are two levels of linking strategy: the micro level, which occurs when going from one link to the next and in which the context is more limited, and the macro level, which refers to the more complex structures that all links of a hypertext are organized into.
Tosca, Susana.“Linking Strategies”
Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media

9. Tosca, Susana.“Linking Strategies”
Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media

10. Tosca, Susana.“Linking Strategies”
Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media

11. See Jill Walker Rettberg’s “Piecing together and tearing apart for some pointers on reading afternoon.