glossary_hyper-, cyber-, and techno-text

Hypertext has three characteristics: “Multiple reading paths, chunked text, and some kind of linking mechanism to connect the chunks. The World Wide Web, with its links, millions of pages and multiple reading paths, is a vast hypertext of global proportions” (Hayles, Writing Machines, 26).

George P. Landow notes that there is a “kind of collage-writing intrinsic to hypertext,” calling Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl a “digital-collage narrative… Hypertext, Jackson permits us to see, enables us to recognize the degree to which the qualities of collage — particularly those of appropriation, assemblage, concatenation, and the blurring of limits, edges, and borders — characterize a good deal of the way we conceive of gender and identity” (Landow, “Stitching Together Narrative, Sexuality, Self: Shelley Jackson’s ‘Patchwork Girl’“).

Cybertext (a neologism derived from Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics), is a category of text proposed by Espen Aarseth whose work, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, described a “wide variety of texts that used combinatorial strategies” (Hayles, 27). He expanded the idea by “developing a typology of semiotic variables, including in addition to links such concepts as perspective, access, determinability, transcience, dynamics, and user function” (IBID).

These variables have 576 possible variations when mixed and matched. A grid is formed. Rhetorical strategies of texts are described and characterized according to where they fall on this grid.

“Cybertexts share a principle of calculated production, but beyond that there is no obvious unity of aesthetics, thematics, literary history, or even material technology” (Aarseth, Introduction).

Technotexts are “literary works that strengthen, foreground, and thematize the connections between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate open a window on the larger connections that unite literature as a verbal art to its material forms” (Hayles, 25). So in other words the words cease to be merely words. They take on material meaning and serve some function. This term “connects the technology [computer? internet/virtual environment?] that produces texts to the texts’ verbal [example of this?] constructions” (Hayles, 26).

Cybertext is closely related to hypertext and Katherine Hayles’ technotext, a term I’m having a bit of trouble isolating at this point. Hypertext = links. Cybertext = perspective, access, determinability, transcience, dynamics, user function. Perhaps all three are on the same hierarchical level, but employ distinct meanings. Is one more “advanced” than the others?

Example: “These developments have invested hypertext and cybertext with connotations that make them useful relatives to technotext but also significantly different from what I have in mind when I use that term” (Hayles, 28).

Consideration: Would the texts viewed in these online literary journals be considered technotexts, hypertexts, or cybertexts? Would they be a mixture of all, or a combination? Do different pages employ different strategies? This may be important for analysis. Where do I obtain this grid of Aarseth Hayles speaks of? Could I incorporate this into the thesis? It follows the logic. If these texts aren’t as subject to semiotic study as I thought then can they be analyzed using this grid?

Strategy: My first task in this case would be to define (within the context of these studies) the variables specific to cybertext mentioned above.

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