Machine Enhanced (Re)minding: the Development of Storyspace

This article traces the history of Storyspace, the world’s first program for creating, editing and reading hypertext fiction. Storyspace is crucial to the history of hypertext as well as the history of interactive fiction. It argues that Storyspace was built around a topographic metaphor and that it attempts to model human associative memory. The article is based on interviews with key hypertext pioneers as well as documents created at the time. Note: This article is an extract from Belinda’s forthcoming book, Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext (Anthem Press, UK (2013)). The book is largely based on interviews with the original hypertext pioneers. Copies can be pre-ordered from the publisher. Re:minding. And yet. But still. (Mais encore) Still flowing. (Michael Joyce, unpublished manuscript, [Joyce 2011a, 3]) Michael Joyce has kept a journal for many years. Before he begins to write, he inscribes the first page with an epigram: "Still flowing". As anyone who has read Joyce’s fictions or critical writing will attest, his work is replete with multiple voices and narrative trajectories, a babbling stream of textual overflow interrupted at regular intervals by playful, descriptive whorls and eddies. If there is a common thread to be drawn between his hyperfictions, his academic writing and his novels, then it is this polyglot dialogue, as Robert Coover terms it — a lyrical stream of consciousness. Joyce can tell a story. And he has told many stories: four books, forty scholarly essays, and at last count (my count), a dozen fictions.[1] What courses through this work is a gentle concern, or even fixation, with how stories are told, with "how we make meaning, as if a caress" [Joyce 2004, 45]. The metaphor of water is an appropriate one. Like Ted Nelson, who had his first epiphany about the nature of ideas and the connections between them as he trailed his hand in the water under his grandfather’s boat, Joyce has long been concerned with how to represent a multiplicity of ideas and their swirling interrelationships, with how stories change over time. In the essay "What I Really Wanted to Do I Thought", about the early development of Storyspace, Joyce writes: What I really wanted to do, I discovered, was not merely to move a paragraph from page 265 to page 7 but to do so almost endlessly. I wanted, quite simply, to write a novel that would change in successive readings and to make those changing versions according to the connections that I had for some time naturally discovered in the process of writing and that I wanted my readers to share. [Joyce 1998, 31] That novel, of course, would become afternoon , the world’s first hypertext fiction [Joyce 1987]. The development of Storyspace is, at least in part, the story of Joyce’s quest to find a structure for what did not yet exist, or as he wrote in a lengthy document created at the time called the Markle Report (see note on sources[2]), to find "a structure editor...for creating 'multiple fictions'" [Bolter and Joyce 1986, 12]. As I have argued elsewhere,[3] the early hypertext systems were built to embody particular visions about how the human mind and memory work, to represent the "complex interconnections" that hold between ideas. Each system (re)presented a different model of these interconnections and of the perceived complexity underlying a mass of information. As Jay David Bolter put it in 1991, "electronic symbols...seem to be an extension of a network of ideas in the mind itself" [Bolter 1991, 207] (also cited by [Joyce 1998, 23]). Storyspace is no exception; Joyce intuitively felt that stories disclose themselves in their "connectiveness," and that "we are associative creatures. That’s what we do" [Joyce 2011b]. Unlike the hypertext pioneers van Dam, Engelbart, Nelson or Bush, however, Joyce is first and foremost a writer – and Storyspace was designed for writers. The image of potentiality that guided Joyce was consequently a literary one; it started with an idea for a novel. In every interview Joyce has given about afternoon or the development of Storyspace, the leitmotif of a "story that changes each time you read it" returns like a Wagnerian melody. Joyce’s writing is filled with such recurrences, with images and phrases that return again and again; "recurrence is the sounding of memory in air," he writes in Othermindedness [Joyce 2004, 97]. As Stuart Moulthrop observed in response to this article, the name "Joyce" is also an echo, "an echo he won’t acknowledge for fear of trading on homonymity" [Moulthrop 2011]. Joyce, keen as always to create a self-reflexive eddy in the text, has a response to that response)[4]. This particular image, the image of a multiple fiction, is important enough that it appears verbatim or near verbatim in many of his essays on hypertext (e.g., [Joyce 1998, 31] [Bolter 1991, 247] [Joyce 2004, 123] as a "multiple" story).