FORMAL
ANALYSIS OF THE HYPERTEXT
Presentation of the hypertext.
Aspects of the hypertext.
§Page style.
§ Form of the
text.
§ Links.
§ Images.
§ Ending/endings.
Presentation of the hypertext
This hypertext starts with an image in colour of Buda
and with the title of the hypertext, Everything After
That. Both things are in colour blue.
The title is a link, and it moves the reader to the
beginning of the hypertext.
This hypertext consists on the different moments in the life of the
protagonist. He is an alcoholic and he has different experiences during some
years of his life.
Aspects of the hypertext:
§PAGE STYLE
All the pages
of the hypertext present the same form. All of them have a piece of text and at
the end of it, they have one, two or three links. This
links will move the reader trough the action of the work.
In some pages, there are annotations of the narrator,
which are situated next to the text.
In some pages, appears a blue sentence, which is
dragged on the screen by the cursor.
These sentences are not links, but they could be such as titles, or
subtitles of the hypertext. It seems that the authoress puts these sentences to
divide the hypertext in chapters.
The background of all the pages is the same, a black,
white and grey image, which is a drawing of a suspension bridge. There are not
more images in any page.
We can observe, too, that this hypertext hasn’t got
any type of music.
§ FORM OF THE
TEXT
Here, I have to say that the text has a simple structure.
The
authoress uses a simple vocabulary, which all the readers can understand.
Moreover, I have to say that the narrator tells the story in first person.
For instance:
“That was June. In July I began going to meetings with other alcoholics.
From day one it seemed
important for obvious reasons
to submerge myself in the buzzing yellow
overhead lights in all those church basements
and to think seriously about what the
people in front seemed to
be saying, so I drank
their coffee and I sat on their hard
chairs and I watched
their once-wild girls with their
cigarettes and their nails bitten down
to the quick. I was happy and anxious each time one of them spoke.”
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/martha_conway/html/july.html
§LINKS
Links are the most important feature that the
hypertexts have. Their function is to guide the reader through the different
possibilities that the hypertext offers.
Links appearance
After to read this hypertext of Martha Conway, we can
see that the links that appear in it are not images. This links are the months
of the year, but the authoress does not use all of them.
Here have an example of the links that appear in this
hypertext:
|
|
“This is not to be read as a list. I was
recently asked at a job interview the influences on my life and I went back in
my mind to the time when it seemed all the interesting people were
dying. Eric Foot ate a handful of mushrooms and went into cardiac
arrest at an outdoor concert, my cousin Marlin flipped his car into oncoming
traffic, and then two weeks later the best of us, Timmy Hughes (we called him
Kiki), a man incapable of spite or sarcasm, was drinking up by the estuary
one Saturday night and he dove into the dark green water only to float up
three days later, leaving behind a dog and an engagement ring for Ginnie Foot
who was Eric Foot’s sister.” |
|
URL: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/martha_conway/html/0deaths.html
The reader can find has to choose between one, two or
three different links, which show him/her a different way to following the
story of the hypertext. For instance:
“[…] Before we went
in I looked over the railing and noticed that our two cigarette butts by chance
lay absolutely perfectly parallel to each other on the grass, and I took this
to be a sign either that we would stay together or that something else was
going on which I would understand in time.”
URL: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/martha_conway/html/toxins.html
“[…] There was absolute silence in the room after he told us
this, we were in a high school gymnasium. He said, I guess the statute of
limitations ran out on that.”
URL: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/martha_conway/html/2suggestions.html
How work the links in this hypertext?
/ What they represent?
Another important aspect of this links is they
function. As I have said on the top, their function is to guide the reader
through the different possibilities that the hypertext offers.
In this case the links give the reader the possibility
of move through the story of the hypertext, but through of the time of the
work. For this reason, the authoress decided that the links were some months of
the year, because they represent the time of the work. We can say that the
links and the time of the hypertext are related.
Total links
In all the hypertext, there are a 55-60 links in
total, approximately. But some of them bring the reader to the same ways. This
means that there are 18 links which bring the reader to different ways through
the work, approximately.
§IMAGES
The images are another important aspect of the hypertexts.
In this hypertext, Everything
After That, only appear two images:
One of them is the image of Buda that appears at the
beginning of the work. This is a blue image.
(You can see it here: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/martha_conway/everything.html )
The other one is the image that she uses as the background
of each page of the hypertext. This image hasn’t got a lot of colour, it is a black, white and grey background. You have
two examples here:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/martha_conway/html/0deaths.html
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/martha_conway/html/toxins.html
Another important aspect to emphasize is that there
are not interactive images. They are
static.
This means that in this hypertext the authoress does
not think that images are better than words.
§ENDING/ENDINGS
A lot of times, hypertexts have more than one ending.
In this case, this hypertext has only one ending. All the possible ways, that
the reader can choose, bring him/her at the same ending.
It is supposed that Martha Conway had thought only one ending because, it is a happy and a sad ending, at the same time. I
say that because, the ending tells the reader two things.
On the one hand, one reading of the ending is that after everything, the
protagonist of the hypertext is happy and has a good life because he has his
friends, although he is alone.
On the other hand, the reader can interpret this
ending as a sad ending. It is because, the protagonist has suffered a lot, and
at the end, he only has his friends (who are the best thing that somebody can
have), but he hasn’t got a person who love him and who want to stay with him
all the time. He is alone.
Example: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/martha_conway/html/1eat.html
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López
Universitat de València Press
Página creada: 28/10/08 actualizada:
05/12/08