Noting that in the genre of fiction, hypertext authors have expressed
a desire to jettison or transcend the limits of narrative, Ayers and his
associate authors of this World Wide Web hypertext wish to resist such
a desire. An "electronic historian," Ayers refuses to submit
to the temptation to "explode the narrative" in his writing;
here, instead, he argues that extended narrative will benefit electronic
text, offering it cohesion (in local strands of narrative extending from
the main thread) and coherence (in the tropes of traditional storytelling).
The "Valley Project" is an experiment in such: a main narrative
offers hypertextual links to subordinate strands of narrative and to digitized
versions of primary historical artifacts themselves. Recounting the story
of two villages-- Staunton, Virginia, and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania--in
their experience of the Civil War, Ayers uses the metaphor of the endnote
citation to allow the reader to arrive at a "landing": direct
access to a source (which might be a simple secondary reference, the roster
of an entire regiment, a ten-year series of newspapers, or collections
of manuscript diaries and letters) without the intermediary of a specific
reference. Ayers announces his intent, ultimately, to include video and
audio nodes as well, so that readers can view battle re-creations, hear
music recordings, and see photograph details, all of which will simultaneously
enliven the reader's experience of the material and tax the hardware capabilities
of the user's system. As of this writing (21 April 1995), the project has
few such links under construction, but nonetheless, once the considerable
tasks of scanning and hard-wiring data sources are further along, could
provide students of history an alternative and pedagogically sound contextualization
of the Civil War period--a contextualization not unlike those that George
Landow proposes in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical
Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992). The author
hopes that "readers will be tempted to construct their own narratives,
connecting things we have not thought to connect, coming up with ideas
that eluded us, adding to the ongoing construction of this history."
(J Paul Johnson.)
Michael Hancher Department of English, University of Minnesota URL: http://umn.edu/home/mh/ebibjpj2.html Comments to: mh@umn.edu Created 29 April 1995 Revised 31 August 1996