Link typology

The role of rhetoric in relation to link typologies is not grounded in the individual relations established between a single link (or even a multiheaded link) between two nodes, but is in fact determined much more substantially by the context provided by an autonomous segment developed across several nodes, and more specfically several links.

A distinction needs to be recognised between the quantity of nodes versus the quantity of links simply because a small number of nodes can produce a significant number of autonomous segments by virtue of a high incidence of linking.

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Three linguistic representations

Allegory is a way of shaping a story so that the characters and the setting are developed so as to have both a literal meaning on the primary level and a secondary meaning on the next level.

Symbolism is the use of the literary symbol, or the use of an object so that the attributes of the object become a substitute for some idea or entity with special significance.

Typology is subtly different from symbolism and is in fact often used as a synonym for symbolism, but it refers more specifically to the representation of things by objects in the sense of representing an entire class or type in one symbolic representation or character.

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Ergodic Literature

The shortcomings of importing theoretical assumptions developed in the context of print into analyses of electronic media were vividly brought to light by Espen J. Aarseth's important book Cybertext: Explorations of Ergodic Literature.

Rather than circumscribe electronic literature within print assumptions, Aarseth swept the board clean by positing a new category of "ergodic literature," texts in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text". Making a different analytical cut through textual groupings that included computer games, print literature and electronic hypertexts, among others, Aarseth established a grid comprised of eight different operators, many of which have purchase mostly with electronic texts rather than print. The grid yields a total of 576 different positions on which a variety of different kinds of texts can be located. Although the method has limitations, notably that it is blind to content and relatively indifferent to the specificity of media, it has the tremendous virtue of demonstrating that electronic texts cannot simply be shoved into the same tent with print without taking into account their different modes of operation. These innovations have justifiably made Cybertext a foundational work for the study of computer games and a seminal text for thinking about electronic literature. Markku Eskelinen's work, particularly "Six Problems in Search of a Solution: The challenge of cybertext theory and ludology to literary theory," further challenges traditional narratology as an adequate model for understanding ergodic textuality, making clear the need to develop frameworks that can adequately take into account the expanded opportunities for textual innovations in digital media.

Proposing variations on Gérard Genette's narratological categories, Eskelinen demonstrates, through a wide variety of ingenious suggestions for narrative possibilities that differ in temporal availability, intertextuality, linking structures, etc., how Aarseth's ergodic typology can be used to expand narratology so it would be more useful for ergodic works in general, including digital works.

By N. Katherine Hayles

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Link types

Generally speaking, poetic and literary discourses are understood to foreground the formal properties of language at the expense of clarity of meaning.

This is, from a literary point of view, a peculiar way of characterising what is celebrated as an art, but broadly speaking literary texts are less concerned with transparency (of meaning, sense, even in some cases, of presentation) than with other effects.

However, this division between the 'noisy' and the 'clear' is generally not strongly recognised in poststructural theory (indeed if anything we could characterise poststructuralism as the recognition of how all information systems are in fact noisy!), and it is probably not useful in any attempt to generate typologies of link types.

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What constitutes a sequence

It is important that we recognise that hypertextual narration is composed of syntagmatic series, and that this series is determined on the basis of some measure of narrative 'integrity' - whether episodic wholeness, readerly comprehension, temporal or thematic unity, or some other criteria (Rosenberg 1996).

This is important because it suggests that the definition and decision of what constitutes a sequence lies as much outside of each constituent part as it does within the content or the connecting of its parts. Hence, if it lies outside, then any ambition to develop or define a typology or classificatory system must always be surrendered in the face of this outside.


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