This analogy is useful; one of the projects I've been working on lately involves the ideas of texts as inhabited spaces. Like most of my work, this isn't anything novel. At CCCC this year, I was in the odd position of being on a panel with Jay Bolter where I was saying that we needed to look at text as spaces, so I need to explain a little bit. We are comfortable thinking of texts that we've written as having spatial qualities, and we're comfortable being *in* textual spaces (such as MOOs) and thinking about our conversation as writing, but we do less with thinking about the act of constructing these spaces as being hypertextual. What draws me to working in MOOs is that the space itself is literally/literarily spatial and temporal, constructed and inhabited. Something like the museum, but also more like a community.

(Like I said, this isn't all that novel--but its surprising to me that we don't see more of it. Most of the spatialized texts I see tend more torwards being artifacts than communities. I'm trying to connect this up with deconstructivist and postmodernist architecture, although that's a completely different thread.)

At 10:23 AM -0500 4/29/99, lirvin@accdvm.accd.edu wrote:

Aside from defining what exactly "hypertext" is (which others are doing very well), what I am most interested in about hypertext is the way in which it changes the relationship and role of the writer and reader.

Consider this analogy of reading/writing to that of a museum visitor and museum curator/docent: In our print-based, linear setting, the visitor/reader enters the museum/text and decides to take the tour from the docent/writer. The docent/writer leads the visitor/reader through the rooms of the museum according to their (the docent/writer's) sequence--page to page, chapter to chapter, period room to period room.

In the hypertext setting, the visitor/reader enters the museum and wanders wherever they wish. There is no guided tour. However, as they enter different rooms the docent/writer appears to talk to them.

I don't know if this is an accurate or helpful analogy, but it seems to capture the profound change that occurs in hypertext to the writer/reader relationship.

Lennie Irvin
San Antonio College

- Johndan Johnson-Eilola
Director of Professional Writing
Department of English
Purdue University
<mailto:johndan@purdue.edu>
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1356
<http://tempest.english.purdue.edu>