by J. Nathan Matias

What does it all Mean?

A tension seems to exist between the desire for creative freedom (in storytelling, and rhetorical power) and the need to be thorough and truthful.

Truth is a difficult thing to pin down. The more historical research I perform, the more frustrated I become with sensational journalists, sloppy dissertations, and the bibliographies of good books that don't list the sources they left out. Even when working with primary sources, I get bogged down choosing who to believe.

So, with the question of absolute truth stuck down some philosophical side hallway, we go down the next corridor: Trust. In my historical research, I make judgment calls on who I trust. Usually, the answer is obvious, and I'm confident that I am very close to the truth of an event. But this is not always the case.

Nonfiction books have been traditionally screened by experts. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, this screening is becoming less and less frequent. And the World Wide Web, intended to be a tool for scholars, is littered with a jumble of half-truths and fabrications. In documentary and nonfiction books, unbelievable stories make some of the best reading. On the Web, if the story is unbelievable, it's probably false.

At the same time public perceptions of trust still lie firmly within traditional media, Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 have educated the general public to issues about accuracy, the use of sources, and narrative technique that have always been a part of any storytelling nonfiction. Reality TV is another good example. Often, people are depicted as someone completely different than their true identity. This is all done through clever editing, the textual camera.

Informal political debates seem to turn more and more frequently on what sources people claim to have read...

The Web has enabled such conversations with the easy access it provides to a large number of sources, from blogs to newspapers, from screeds to congressional hearings.

Digitized information is undermining the authority of traditional media because readers are no longer chained to the textual aperture of the content producer. We can look things up for ourselves.

The Web's potential for quality creative nonfiction has been steadily rising for this reason. Web nonfiction can anticipate this expectation for more information and context by indulging the audience's desire for links and sources. Yet for some reason, beneath all the current-events and speed-driven blog activity, very little is being done. The Web has finally given us the tools we need to speed up the research process, but the world has become even less patient, and archives go largely unused for web-based, creative purposes.

At this point, I could go into a rather long diatribe about all the things Ted Nelson complains about. Copyright isn't sorted out, so using sources is problematic. The economic limitations of the web and Internet actually discourage the type of hotlinking that would be needed for good creative works. The lack of a durable links system means that parts of a web-based creative nonfiction work could disappear. Certainly the Web is a short-term media. Who expects their website to last 50 years? 20? 10? 5?

The current trend in New Media, flash-based documentaries solves some of these problems by ceasing to be hypertext. Exciting new media nonfictions are coming out of PBS (Into the Unknown is a brilliant interactive nonfiction game), the Australian Broadcasting Company (Sounds Like Techno is an amazing example), and many others. However, these works are much more like interactive film documentary than hypertext, since they are merely interactive films delivered through the Web (though to be fair, Sounds Like Techno exists in HTML as well). Unfortunately, in a world moving toward The Semantic Web, nonfiction efforts are producing little black boxes that discourage the interlinking that makes the Web special.

I understand this. Managing copyright is easier this way. But good business sense doesn't make it good hypertext.

Projects like these PBS specials run into problems when they try to use primary sources. Many times, their sources are not digitized. Scanning these sources takes time. Furthermore, like film documentaries, they usually only include the sources that support their central point.

Sounds like Techno includes opposing views, but it doesn't include enough information to help readers decide for themselves. Instead, questions of the exact origin and nature of Detroit Techno are glossed over in a "well people disagree, and, um, moving on..." style that only encourages people to think the questions unimportant.

On the web, be creative. If there's ambiguity, don't avoid the question, like a film or museum creator. Get readers involved. Show them the material, and let them choose.

Other times, digitization discouraged because researchers like to "scoop" each other:

A historian working on a biography once excitedly told me how he was able, through great effort, to track down the some of his subject's important personal papers. These letters were key to the biography.

"I have the only copy of these papers," he proudly exclaimed.

When I mentioned the possibility of digitizing the papers for use by other researchers, he was mortified.

"Well, then anyone could read the papers."

"Right"

"Why would I want to do that? I worked hard to get these. If I digitize the papers, I give it all up. If I keep the letters in my office, I have an edge on anyone else writing his biography."

It was my turn to be mortified.

The amount of digitized information is steadily increasing. The amount of available information is staggering. Thousands of archive sites are just waiting to be cited.

And digitizing is no longer an unwieldy process. In fact, more historical societies are creating digital-camera/scanner friendly policies. Cheap, quality digital cameras and page scanners are making digitization faster and cheaper than photocopies or prints. Furthermore, by interacting with digitized sources while writing, researchers simplify the storage, retrieval, and citation of sources.

Digitization is a revolution that is here already. Researchers can throw away the white gloves. Students now have access to more primary sources and can produce higher quality research. But where is the hypertext revolution in nonfiction that we expected to accompany it? Could someone actually write an article about bows using sources that already existed online? Or would they have to cite the sources the paper way, since the Journals sat behind the locked box of subscriptions? Would the sources be there five years later? How do I get paid?

Would anyone believe the article?

Here, I could descend into a Nelson-ite Diatribe about HTML and the WWW, but that is not the scope of my research. Besides, I have an answer to some of these questions.

Who bothers to do anything creative with already-digitized sources?

• Governments: Many U.S. Government organizations have educational programs that turn out high quantities of educational articles. For example, Explore Pa History.com.
• Universities: From time to time, special groups will undertake join digitizing/storying efforts. For example: Remembering Jim Crow, a beautiful book/cd combination created through Duke University. Another good example is Martha Ballard's Diary Online, which I deal with later.
• James Lileks: Creative work with sources can be fun. The Institute of Official Cheer might not be strict nonfiction, but it gives us an idea of the creative potential.

Lileks aside, people aren't having the same kind of fun with web nonfiction that they enjoy with print nonfiction, museums, or film documentary.

What to do?

I wasn't sure. So I looked at a variety of nonfiction books, films, and museums with an eye open for correlations to hypertext writing.

• Old Friends
• Last Night's Fun
• The Poetry of Shoes
• Free in the State Pen
• Electronic Campfires

Connections

Surprisingly, each work reviewed shared similar structural properties.

Each work used medium-specific techniques to create atmosphere.

Elements of artifactual fiction are present in all of them.

Encompass

The World Wide Web's strengths are able to easily overcome almost all the weaknesses of the other media analyzed, while retaining many of their strengths. However, I don't think it's a question of better. I think we need to explore the Web's unique potential for quality, research-grounded narrative nonfiction.

After looking at a few current sites online, I think I know how to do that.