Untitled - witz cultural

2't2HYPERTEXT 3.0 system that can be manipulated can function as signifying elements. To providean example of the creative use of system features, letus turn to a fewveryearly examples from Writing at the Edge (199a), all of which were created inEastgate Systems' Storyspace, a stand-alone hypertext environment availablefor both Windows and Macintosh platforms.In addition to containing traditional elements such as fonts, graphics,sound, and color, Storyspace also supports the creative utilization of "screenreal estate"-the tiling of windows and the order in which they appear andarrange themselves. Nathan Marsh's lexias in Breath of Sighs place themseivesaround the screen, making the screen layout support the narrative as onecrosses and recrosses the tale at several points (see Figure 22). Marsh's work,which dates from 1993, provided an early demonstration that writing had becomevisual as well as alphanumeric. It also reveals that a single software feature,such as the ability to control window size and location, leads directly toa particular mode of writing-here writing as collage and montage in whichthe multiple-window format permits readers to move back and forth amongoverlapping lexias. This feature also encourages active readers, since they caneasily move about among lexias, thus creating a kind of spatial hypertext.Several other hypertexts from Witing at the Edge show the imaginativedeployment of another system feature of the software-the Storyspace view,a dynamic graphic presentation of the arrangement of document organization.Storyspace, a hypertext environment that also functions as a conceptualorganizer, permits authors to nest individual spaces (lexias) inside others, orto rearrange the hypertext's organization by moving lexias without breakinglinks. Some works, like Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (see Figure 28), takeadvantage ofthis graphic organizational feature to structure hyperfiction bymeans of separate folders or directories. Others, like Ho Lins Nicely Done,arrange all lexias on a single level and indicate discrete narrative lines. Thishypertext novel, which links a murder story and the events of a professionalfootball championship game, suggests its organization by arranging its lexias,all of which appear on the top level, in four parallel lines. Timothy Taylor'sLBJ-Lazarus + Barabbas + fudas-takes graphic indications of narrative andconceptual organization farther than Ho Lin's Nicely Done, arranging its lexiasin the form of three crosses, the central one of which has a circle (halo)) overit. Here, rather than indicating the narrative structure, Taylor implies graphicallysomething about the subject and theme of his fiction. Like similar projectsthat Michael foyce reproduces in O/Two Minds (38), Adam Wenger'sAdamis Bookstore, which I discuss in the following chapter, uses a circular deploymentof the graphic elements representing lexias in Storyspace view to