Originally, hypertext wasn’t the base-line code of the Internet. It was a theoretical construct for containing and organizing information. It worked like this:
You read the sentence “The boy played with the dog.” Now, each part of that sentence gets broken down.
-The Boy
-Played
-With
-The Dog
Each of those sections in-turn leads to either more specific information up or down a never-ending pyramid of information. If you go up it, the pyramid narrows and becomes more specific. If you go down it, the pyramid broadens, giving you more general information.
In hypertext, going up the pyramid via “the boy” would lead you to specific information about the boy. Biographic information, interests, activities, relationships. And every individual piece of each of those chunks of information also had an infinite pyramid attached to them. Going down the pyramid would lead you to information about what a boy is, about his species, his world, his genetics, and the cosmos around him.
Hypertext was an attempt to render information in such a way that everything was understood. Every piece of knowledge, however minute, was available to the reader to be able to fully comprehend what they were reading.
It is heady stuff to think about, and ultimately impossible to achieve. Wikipedia is about as close as you can get to a realistic implementation of the system, and even they know better than to hyperlink everything. They cherry pick the bits that matter, and hope you understand the rest.
(Which is good, and bad. The M-Theory entries are still completely obtuse for me.)
My interest in this is transforming MAGICTOWN into a bit of a hypertext concept site.
In novels, you move backwards and forwards through foreshadowing and reference. Reference something in the past to remind the audience, or tease mystery. Foreshadow to make the reader think about what could happen in the future.
Now, what if I gave you the ability to immediately go backwards and forwards to those events? It would work like this. I’d start with the jQuery.ScrollTo script. Basically, it hides a huge field of information in a relatively small window. By clicking controllers, you move the background around behind the window. Sort of like looking a newspaper on microfiche. Hit the link if you need a visual.
What I would do is put each chapter of the novel as a entry on the huge background, with referential elements tagged in red or blue. Click red and you go to something forward in the novel. Click blue, and you go back to something earlier. But the page isn’t re-loading. Every page of the novel is contained behind this sliding, moving frame.
Ostensibly, it would be a terrible way to read a novel. But, from an experimental information design stand-point, it would be an interesting way to treat the relative elements in a narrative. The viewer would have to restrain themselves from spoiling the story. And since the page isn’t reloading, taking a step, either backwards or forwards, doesn’t have a back option. There aren’t controllers to step back to your previous location.
Hell, in writing this little bit now, I’m wondering about the potential for building a choose-your-own-adventure style engine with this. Hell, you could build the whole damn thing out of WordPress and do an exquisite-corpse style narrative.
Things to think about, thoughts to have, at the very least.