Deena Larsen's "Samplers"
Deena Larsen's Biography
Deena Larsen is a new media, hypertext author. She is best known for creating structural patterns in hypermedia literature. Larsen has been working with electronic literature since the 1980s and is considered one of the pioneer artists in the field. Larsen is a graduate of University of Northern Colorado and holds a bachelor's degree in English and Philosophy. After spending time in Japan and San Francisco, she returned to Colorado, earning her MA from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Deena Larsen's first work, Marble Springs, published by Eastgate Systems Inc. in 1993, was one of the first interactive hypertext poetry collections. Marble Springs explored the lives of women in a Colorado mountain town between 1853 and 1935 in the tradition of The Spoon River Anthology and Winesburg Ohio. Written in Hypercard, Marble Springs presaged web navigational structures and icons. The work provides margins for notes, as well as blank "pages" for readers to add their own characers into the town. Larsen's second work of electronic literature, Samplers, inlcudes nine richly imagined works make up this sampler quilt of hypertext. Stories of spirits returned to haunt the living, of memories that stubbornly refuse to fade, and of children far wiser than their parents.
Versions of Samplers
✭ Version 1.0: Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts for Floppy Disk for Macintosh, copyrighted in 1997
Version 1.1: 3.5-inch floppy disk for Macintosh
✭ Version 2.0: Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts for Floppy Disk for PC, copyrighted in 1997
Version 2.1: 3.5-inch floppy disk for PC
✭ Version 3.0: Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts for CD-ROM, copyrighted in 1997
Version 3.1: For Macintosh System Software 7.x-OS 10.6 and PCs running Windows 3.0 and Windows 95
Critical ReferencesBernstein, Mark. “Patterns of Hypertext.” Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. HYPERTEXT ’98, ACM Press, 1998, pp. 21–29. DOI.org (Crossref), doi: 10.1145/276627.276630.
Ensslin, Astrid, and Alice Bell. “‘Click = Kill’: Textual You in Ludic Digital Fiction.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, vol. 4, 2012, pp. 49–73. JSTOR, doi: 10.5250/storyworlds.4.2012.0049.
Tosca, Susana. "Review of Deena Larsen's Samplers". Hipertula. N.D. https://webs.ucm.es/info/especulo/hipertul/samplers2.html.
