Christiane Paul provided an overview of the hypertext scene. She began with a pre-web history of hypertext by describing Ted Nelson’s 1961 dream of hypermedia: grand collaborations in linked reading and writing that connect to reader-response criticism and theories of post-modernism and post-structuralism. Paul moved into the strategies and structures of hypertext by highlighting a number of projects created in Storyspace, the hypertext writing software. Michael Joyce’s Twilight Symphony uses a compass tool to access different timeframes of the story, as in east for past and west for future. Jane Yellowlees Douglas takes a different approach with her hourglass structure of I Have Said Nothing. No matter what the chosen metaphor, Paul pointed out that these structures are essential for holding the user’s interest in an environment in which one could be easily lost.
