Interface Metaphors
There is a final group of hypertexts that I want to mention, even though I did
not include them as a category: Texts that are structured around the metaphor
of a particular software interface, usually an interface that was popular at
the time the webtext was written. An early example of this genre is Anthony Rue's "The
Case of Object #143 or A Manifesto of CineTextual Writing" (Kairos 1.1,
1996), which is designed and written as a series of MOO logs turned into HTML
pages. More recently, Susan Loudermilk Garza and Tommy Hern published their
webtext, "Using
Wikis as Collaborative Writing Tools: Something Wiki This Way Comes--Or Not!" (Kairos 10.1,
2005) inside of the Texas A&M-Corpus Christi wiki (which I found pretty
entertaining until I wandered off into some of the wiki support pages and got
totally lost), and Tim Lindgren nailed the look of a blogging site in his webtext, "Blogging
Places" (Kairos 10.1, 2005). Most recently Rich Rice and Cheryl
Ball's "Reading
the Text: Remediating the Text" (Kairos 10.2, 2006) remediate
metaphors from a DVD in their video-rich webtext. Although these are fascinating
hypertexts, I decided not to include interface metaphors as a category in the next
section because each of these texts uses one of the organizing patterns
described earlier in this section along with its interface metaphor so it made
more sense to stick with the original eight patterns, though Rice and Ball's
engaging work integrates the DVD menu metaphor so thoroughly into its hypertextual
structure that I may soon need to revisit this decision.