INVITED SPEAKER
Taking Hypertext Seriously:Scholarship and Storytelling
Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems, Inc.
Complex narrative structures are critical not only to storytelling, but also to myriad forms of technical and scholarly writing. Hypertext critics argue (usually without evidence) that hypertext is intrinsically unsuited to complex narrative or indeed to coherent argumentation. But stories are everywhere:
Chieko Yoshimura is not enjoying her first professional conference. The papers are fascinating, and travel is exciting. But the contents of her purse vanished sometime during the first day, and with it her passport, plane tickets, and credit cards -- and the password to her Web server.
Our protagonist has lost an important codex book, her passport, but this precipitating incident need not cause irreparable harm. The discovery that her home page has been mysteriously transformed, and will shortly be famous, will have a more substantial impact on her career even though no codex, indeed no artifact, is involved.
The artifactual form of books and journals undergoes continual change and refinement, as technologies and tastes change from generation to generation. As serious writing migrates from the printed page to the screen, the development of hypertext and of the World Wide Web has made these changes unusually clear and has often evoked an emotional, rather than a critical, response.
Eastgate Systems, Inc. is a pioneer company in the development of hypermedia and hypertext writing tools, and world-renowned publishers of original hypertexts--poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Eastgate Systems, founded in 1982, was referred to in the New York Times as "the New Directions of electronic publishing," a reference to the famous vanguard print publishing house, in recognition of the innovative and intellectual quality of the company's products. At Eastgate, Bernstein has created and managed hypertext tools and technologies, including the Storyspace hypertext writing environment which has been widely regarded as the tool of choice for serious and literary hypertext. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Bernstein received his doctorate in Chemistry, from Harvard University.
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Mark
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