by J. Nathan Matias

Weighing

Each of the media examined in this study has some natural strengths and weaknesses. Often, similar principles are at work across media boundaries. Studying the effectiveness of such techniques and principles in their medium give us insight into assembling effective creative hypertext nonfiction.

Artifactual Nonfiction and Viewer Agency

Surprisingly, film documentary falls the shortest in this area. This is an important distinction. Although film documentaries are assembled with many sources from a variety of genres, the voices are constantly telling viewers what to think. They force viewers to be passive.

Books do better. While Old Friends doesn't include many artifactual quotes, Kidder's emphasis on placing meaning between his paragraphs keeps the reader thinking. Ciaran Carson's Last Night's Fun gets an A+ in both areas. Artifactual writing is a key part of the book, and the book's chaotically-poetic style demands an active reader.

Both the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Eastern State Penitentiary utilize the ideas artifactual narrative. The penitentiary is more obvious -- the museum is a conglomeration of artifacts-- but the Holocaust Museum shows skillful design whenever visitor agency is required.

Digging Deeper

Museums win this contest. Although Eastern State Penitentiary and the Holocaust Memorial Museum differ widely in narrative technique, they both have research archives where interested visitors may continue to study in detail from primary materials.

Books and films do poorly here, although DVDs may change that. The Band of Brothers DVD includes some primary source information, but not enough for viewers to do any substantial discovery.

With a continually-growing collection of useful information coming on-line and recent developments in digital photography, this is not a problem for Web-based nonfiction. The important question is currently shifting; we are longer wondering if the information is digitized, but we worry about sorting through the piles of digitized information.

Strength/Weaknesses with Web Nonfiction

Hypertext is perfect for accomplishing the kind of structure found in books like Old Friends and Last Night's Fun. The main difficulty here is the use of the author function. In these books, readers work hard to understand because they feel strongly about the existence of authorial intent. Hypertext, on the other hand, carries with it the illusion in many minds that the reader is more powerful than the author. Hypertexts can overcome this, as is the case in Dylan Kinnett's hypertext novella To Win, Simply Play. Kinnett's novella is interesting because all of his storytelling techniques could be fairly used in reputable nonfiction.

Hypertext can also overcome this through a very carefully-limited set of sources. In my suggestion at the end of this paper, I decide to throw out this idea.

Another point: the Web can't match museums in their use of space. The interactive nature of Eastern State Penitentiary cannot be (3d environments are unwieldy) effectively reproduced in hypertext. However, hypertext can borrow some of the ideas from museums.

The penitentiary can become a metaphor for a collection of digitized sources. With that idea in your mind, (re)read the section on the Eastern State Penitentiary. The possibilities are many. In the conclusion of this paper, I discuss one possibility.

The Web's weaknesses have to do with copyright, linking, attribution, and trust. This paper isn't about technology, standards, and the future of the Web's basic operation, so I will leave this topic alone. But something needs to be done. Soon.