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Abstract

In the study of literature and creative writing, the traditional formats of books and their editorial apparatuses impose such cognitive obstacles that students are effectively barred from experiencing authentic investigations of the author's various engagements, including revisions and editing, with a text. We report the development of hypertext programs that overcome many cognitive obstacles while providing an experience of scholarly investigation, including imitation of an author's style and editing of different versions of an author's work.

Description

I. Problem. For all its virtues as a vehicle of communication, the book has several drawbacks for teachers and students of literature. First, each version of a book is a snapshot in time, crystallized and set in a static form that does not easily reveal the dynamic process of literary creation from which it originated. Attempts to explore the causes of textual change across versions of a text have been constructed within "book" technology, but they impose a tremendous cognitive burden on the student. So-called "critical editions" include a complete version of the work with an appended "editorial apparatus" that contains variants of words and phrases from other versions. In order to consider an alternative variant, however, the reader must commit it to memory (or paper), then substitute it for the printed phrase in the body of the text, and finally evaluate its significance within the context of the whole text. This is a challenging task even for experienced scholars, and it isolates less experienced students from the content area.

II. Solution. We have implemented a hypertext solution that alleviates the need to memorize competing variants, and that enables students to explore textual variants on both a micro- and macro-level. For this purpose we have developed a sort of "smart" hypertext, which we refer to as "substitutive hypertext".

The Hypertext Explorer system includes three stand-alone modules: the core Hypertext Explorer, Mix and Match, and Collator. The first two modules are learning environments and the last is an authoring tool to create additional substitutive hypertexts. Hypertext Explorer enables users to compare two chronologically arranged versions of any variant, to substitute one for the other, and to study the effects of an author's changes without the need to memorize variants or flip back and forth between different pages. All the evidence of textual change is presented in the span of an eye. In addition to providing improved student access, Hypertext Explorer is designed to serve as a research simulation. For each variant passage the student must attempt to infer the influence(s) that caused change, such as the author's "free will" or "self-censorship" in the face of criticism, editorial "collaboration", or "corruption" (copy error), to name a few. The student may delete old motives, or introduce new ones. This activity is intended to encourage reflection and analysis; so, each choice must be justified by a short essay in a linked text field. Finally, students may publish hypothetical reconstructions of a work after the attribution of motives is complete. This activity returns the student from fine-grained study of individual variants to a consideration of the whole integrated work.

Mix and Match enables emulation of an author's style. Mix and Match allows the student to pick and choose story elements (e.g. beginnings or endings), and to rearrange or recombine them while trying to emulate the writing style of the their author. This activity is intended to promote closer study of the author's style.

Collator: This last module enables a student, instructor, or researcher to search for differences in two versions of a text, and to create a new marked document that can be imported into Hypertext Explorer, where it is automatically converted to live substitutive hypertext.