[Click upon picture to obtain a full-size image (approximately twelve inches wide).]
This snapshot records a session with Eastgate Systems Storypace version of the Victorian Web, a hypertext document comprising approximately six hundred essays and two thousand links created at Brown University. This hypertext document (or web), which was produced using Eastgate Systems's program Storyspace, includes materials on Victorian literature, art, religion, science, technology, and social and political history. When the web opens the reader encounters a graphic overview ("Victorian Web OV"), which appears at upper left. After using this overview to open a list of Victorian authors, which appears at the upper right, the reader has begun to explore Victorian religion, beginning with the "Religion in England Overview," using it to obtain, in turn, David Cody's essay on Methodism, George P. Landow's on the defining beliefs of evangelical Protestantism, and Anthony S. Wohl's on the restoration of full civil rights to Britain's Roman Catholics in 1829. Cody designed and wrote this body of linked materials about religion in the U. K., which are interwoven with a wide variety of subjects, including individual authors, public health, Victorian attitudes toward race and class, and political history. In both principle and practice electronic linking produces an open-ended, unfinished form of textuality, since later readers can always add new documents and links. In this example, this essay by Wohl, which he created as part of a set of documents on Victorian English attitudes towards the Irish, was added several years after the creation of the religion in England node. As this example shows, the electronic linking leads to a form of electronic textuality characterized by collaboration and interdisciplinarity.
[Comparing this present html version of the Victorian Web to the above screen shot reveals how much flatter — and less hypertextual — the Web version is than those possible in richer multiwindowed systems like Storyspace.]
Last modified 18 October 2005