Spatiality plays an important role in the form hypertexts take. Indeed, thanks to its print heritage andits code-based nature, aesthetics are fundamental to hypertext. The markup languages that make the Web possible rely heavily on form. Only by strictly adhering to the code language’s established grammar can that language be understood by the computers that process it and, consequently, the human readers. The situation parallels one already familiar to every user of the English language.
In “The Text Between the Voice and the Book,” Roger Chartier argues for the importance of punctuation and the “meanings produced by forms” (69). He uses the prologue to Shakespeare’s play-within-the-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an example of how form affects language. When Quince delivers the prologue to the workmen’s play, he does so without the proper punctuation, producing a monologue that conveys the opposite of what he intended to his royal audience. The lesson Chartier says we should take is that the written form of language affects the possible meanings readers can take from it. For a contemporary example, look to the joke that inspired the title of Lynne Truss’s immensely popular grammar book Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
In print, the author usually rules over punctuation. With that power comes the ability to command some of the text’s basic interpretations through the choice of punctuation—where sentences are broken, the use of semicolons rather than periods, creatively using dashes, etc. When an author, for example Cormac McCarthy, purposely alters or omits punctuation, the reading process becomes harder. McCarthy leaves out quotation marks, inviting interesting interpretative opportunities. Readers are thrown into the position of having to take on a portion of what is traditionally the author’s job as punctuator just to make sense of the text. Now, whereas in print this can be an annoyance or challenge, in a hypertext the punctuation of a document determines whether it can be read at all.
The most common language use to build modern hypertexts is Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. This language allows computers to recognize certain markers and then parse them in a way most readers can understand. For example, to make text italic in HTML, the author or designer must enclose the word or phrase with markers, or “tags,” that indicate how the receiving computer will display the text. So: Word or Word yields Word when displayed in software that recognizes HTML. The particularities of HTML allow for multiple sets of tags to produce the same result. While the tags seem more intuitive, as I stands for italics, the tag stands for emphasis. As a broader term, emphasis can be read by far more software applications and possibly, with some tinkering, not even displayed as italic text. As with punctuation in print, readers often take it for granted that a document is punctuated correctly, only noticing when something is wrong or different. Susan Hockey explains that “markup makes explicit for computer processing things that are implicit for the human reader” (Hockey 362).
The obsession with form does not end with markup language, however. It can hardly be called an “obsession” for markup in any case, seeing as how that kind of form is crucial to the formation of the readable text. However, form is an obsession when it comes to “electronic editions” of printed books, other wise known as e-books. These electronic texts are designed to be read on a computer screen or portable devices, and despite the hopes of e-book proponents over the last twenty years, this form of hypertext has not become very popular among readers. The standard reason given, though hardly a scientific one, is that they fail the “cuddle” test. People will never abandon trusty printed books because it is impossible to cuddle up on a sofa or in bed with a computer monitor. In other words, by removing reading from the seclusion of comfortable private places and transforming it into a practice that requires almost devotional presence in an uncomfortable place where an intermediary sits between the reader and the “pure” reading (oddly similar to a church or temple’s function in religion, to make worship a public, penitent experience). Of course, the technology required to read e-books has advanced since that “test” was first mentioned in hypertext criticism. Computers are small enough now to retire with the reader to whatever private space they deem fit, but Hockey suggests there is more to the lackluster performance of e-books.
She points out that simply deciding how to create an electronic book is complicated, especially in the humanities and especially if that e-edition simulates a printed monograph. In “The Reality of Electronic Editions,” Hockey writes that the most popular and easiest to use code-language, HTML, has problems functioning in the ways humanities scholars want to use electronic texts. Specifically, HTML has trouble generating meaningful results when scholars perform full-text searches on texts. The results do not, for example, distinguish between a word located in a title and one located in a footnote. HTML, whose set of markup tags are strictly regulated, doesn’t know the difference between more than the most elementary portions of a document (mainly “header,” “body,” and “footer”). That’s because HTML’s primary purpose is to create visually stimulating, not textually rich, material. Jon Bosak and Tim Bray examine HTML’s inadequacies more fully. Though it is popular, they write, “it is superficial,” concerned mainly with the appearance of the displayed page (Bosak and Bray). Most of the language’s tags indicate how to parse text, whether bolded or italicized, underlined or block-quoted. No tags are concerned with classifying lexias or individual words into humanities-useful categories like title, byline, topic sentence, or thesis. Thus far, HTML has focused on organizing information on the screen rather than structuring it ways that are useful to scholars (Shipman et al.). It makes little sense to attempt to approach the humanities through hypertext; the needed features just aren’t there, so scholars leave it alone, preferring to leave hypertexts to the scientists.
Posted by Michael Becker on September 6, 2007
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