In Digital Literature, Ideas are as Important as New Technology

 

For the stories I wanted to hear, I looked in other formats, in feminist magazines and maverick novels. I compiled an anthology documenting the experiences of Victorian women – prostitutes, medical students, circles of women friends – who had not found a place in classic fiction. But the anthology format was as limiting in its way as the marriage plot. Frustrated by the constraint of producing a single book with a single pattern of organization, I filled my collection with multiple cross-references, encouraging the reader to jump from one topic to another. I simply wanted the reader to understand Mary Taylor’s exhilaration in opening a dry goods store in New Zealand in the context of her friendship with Charlotte Bronte as well as in relation to the range of Victorian opinion on women’s work. I did not think of this cross-referencing as hypertext because I had not yet heard the term.

 

– Janet Murray “Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace” (2007)

In this extract, Janet Murray’s frustration at the lack of stories she, and by extension others, wanted to read, led her to compile an anthology to tell some of those stories. But rather than using a typical linear mode of narrative, she organised her anthology in such a way that topics could be explored easily and according to the curiosity of the reader, who could have an exciting experience of discovery by following multiple links to other stories. Her idea enabled a different mode of exploring texts, where the narrative could be different according to each reader’s individual path. For readers, this made for a liberating mode of reading texts, and empowered them to create their own meanings. On a wider cultural level, she showed that traditionally marginalised stories and viewpoints were able to be represented and reinterpreted in new ways, using current technology to explore ideas, and that digital literature can be thought of in terms of concepts and ideas, without necessarily requiring the use of newer technologies at all.

That Murray had not heard of hypertext was not important. The value of her method lay with the repurposing of the existing means at her disposal. After making her hypertextual anthology, later developments in technology, including hyperlinking, could show where new improvements in literature could be made. There is always scope for reimagining current ways of doing things, and it prompts one to consider whether it may be equally valuable to concentrate on using traditionally available, simpler technologies to create conceptual and theoretical digital literatures, rather than using advanced technologies created by modern science to, for example, incorporate animations into a work. Digital literature can take many forms, and purer, more theoretical works may add as much to the form through new ideas as forms taking advantage of new digital technologies do.

The holodeck referenced in Murray’s title is a concept used in the Star Trek television series. A holodeck was a virtual environment where humans could enter and conduct existential experiments, and speculate on philosophical concepts. Murray suggests that conceptual holodecks can exist within ourselves, as a normal part of a creative process, whereby we can experiment with ideas relevant to creating new meanings in literature.

Innovations in digital literature are possible without technology. Writers, artists, and coders, in seeking to create digital literature, may find fertile ground in occasionally stepping back from the more technological aspects of the form, to consider some abstract and theoretical elements which could prove to create innovative literature too.