In a hypertext fiction, place a main character in a situation that draws people together: a party, a competition, a meeting, a holiday festival.

For example, Tim is a freshman at his first off-campus party in the fall at UMD. It’s Friday night, and he’s walked over from the dorm with some guys that he doesn’t know very well. He’s holding can of Old Milwaukee Lite in one hand. He didn’t drink during high school in Eveleth—his big claim to fame was editing the school newspaper—but he’s decided that hardly anybody knows him here, and he can be anything he wants. He can hear a group of jocks behind him teasing a girl about going home to the Twin Cities every weekend to see her boyfriend. She just laughs. Two guys with long hair are sunk down in a beat-up couch, their bony white knees poking out holes in their jean legs, complaining about the selection of movies in town. Tim notices that a trickle of people keep going out the backdoor of the run-down house, and come back in a few minutes all red cheeked. They have snow in their hair, but they aren’t wearing their coats. Tim notices how nearly everybody is looking over the shoulders of the people their talking to, like someone more important is about to show up.

It’s the odd, minutely specific details that make a culture vivid on the page.

Create tension by describing the action from the point of view of

• a newcomer, a stranger, whose fresh eyes will pick up details that most in the group would have long since stopped noticing.
• or choose a point-of-view character who knows the culture intimately, but now feels alienated. He or she knows it too well.

Produce a hypertext that allows the “user” to explore this gathering from the point of view of this character. The dramatic tension between the character and the gathering provides unity and direction to the hypertext. The character need not act out on his or her feelings. The drama happens as the user navigates the hypertext and experiences both the gathering and the sense of character in palpable detail.

Design-wise, the hypertext should establish a consistent set of procedures or rules that enable the reader to navigate intentionally, but that also helps you to direct that reader’s choices and to convey the effects you want.

Examples and Vehicles

• All in the Family, completed in response to this assignment.

Printout of Text Only

Please combine the text of all the Gathering screens into a single, continuous print document for me to read and respond to. Divide the text into sections labeled with the file name or page title of the pages where that text appears. Do not print out all the screens.

You will also write a commentary on this project, as usual.

Criteria

Writing

• Unity achieved by creating and maintaining a tension between the main character and the gathering/setting
• Sense of Character (“position”)
• Sense of Place, Setting (physical, cultural, “historical”)
• Sense of the Gathering (social and cultural contexts, location in social world)
• Level of local color, palpable atmosphere
• Sense of unity, simultaneity created through Motifs (suggestive repetitions)
• Main pages establishes context, provides an enticing introduction
• Consistency, texture, strength of the voice of the narrator (1st person, 2nd, or 3rd)
• Effectiveness of transitions from lexia to lexia (see Murray 82)

Design

• Establishes a set of rules and procedures that “script the interactor” (Murray 79) and enable intentional navigation (the sense that the user can choose and explore, and that doing so will produce an experience)
• main page(s) establish these rules and procedures, provides a functional beginning
• Hypertext is designed to suggest simultaneity and unity, develop the character, and create an experience of the gathering/setting
• Images used effectively with text, text “visualized” appropriately for the screen
• General visual depth, visual choices heighten effect of the writing

Technical

• Links and navigational choices presented effectively
• Effective use of technical options from lexia to lexia: simple links, multiple child windows, new browser windows (disables back button), availability of links
• Main page helps to establish technical procedures or “rules” of reading.
• Technical tools generally used to heighten the effect of the writing
  

This assignment is based in part on Jerome Stern's Making Shapely Fiction.