ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

Links of interest

I thought people might enjoy Everything2, which I think is a very interesting phenomenon from the cybertext standpoint. E2 is an attempt at a multi-user catalog of... well, everything. Individual subjects ("nodes") can have one or more writeups by different users, and those writeups can be factual or fictional depending on the subject (some nodes have both). All writeups must include "hard links" (words within the writeup that link to other nodes) and "soft links" (links at the bottom of the page, which mark the paths followed from that node -- when you go from one node to another, you automatically create a soft link, and the most commonly traversed paths are higher in the list). Soft links are always the names of existant nodes, since you have to actually go to another node to create the link, but hard links can be any part of the text... so if a user clicks on a hard link that says, say, "ye cannot get ye flask," and sees that there is no node of that name, he or she can create one. Users can also vote on writeups, so the really bad ones get nuked.

Here's the writeup on cybertext, to get you started. Click anywhere that's blue.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=533631

Also, and this is significantly sillier but equally addictive, I found this text game version of Hamlet. Easier than ADVENT, less annoying than Shade, judicious hints provided by me if you get sucked in:

http://www.robinjohnson.f9.co.uk/adventure/hamlet.html

(Note that the avatar is "I" instead of "you"... hmm. Can we make anything of that?)

Posted by Jess at February 21, 2004 05:28 AM