Loading Screens for the 1992 Mac Edition of afternoon & 1994 Mac Edition of Victory Garden

 

As both video clips demonstrate, the loading screen of early hypertext literature created on the Storyspace platform offers much useful information about the work.

First, the number of nodes and links alerts readers to the size of a work, much like the number of pages of a book provides readers with a sense of the time commitment to it. Joyce's 1992 Macintosh Edition of afternoon, a noon, for example, is 177 kilobytes in size and has 539 Spaces (nodes of text), and 951 Links. It takes approximately 34 seconds to load on the Macintosh Classic. In comparison, Moulthrop's Victory Garden is 713 kilobytes in size and has 993 Places (nodes of text) and 2804 Links. On the same computer it takes approximately 3:40 minutes to load. Grigar remembers launching Victory Garden and, then, leaving it to load while she made herself a cup of coffee.

Second, the terms, "Spaces" and "Places," explain the way hypertexts are expressed spatially. Beginning with its release in 1990, afternoon, a story uses Spaces, a convention perhaps influenced by the notion of "spatial form" attributed to Joseph Frank and cited in Jay David Bolter's Writing Space (1991) as the way of talking about the "architecture of a text that works against the 'strict causal-chronological order'" (159). This conceptual perspective makes sense since Bolter and Joyce, along with John B. Smith, developed Storyspace before licensing the software to Bernstein at Eastgate Systems, Inc. in the late 1980s, and Joyce's novel figures largely in Bolter's book about hypertext. On the other hand, from the earliest edition onward of Victory Garden, Moulthrop refers to nodes as Places, suggesting a physical environment with surfaces and boundaries that humans can experience and locate on a map. Influenced as he was by Jorge Luis Borge's "The Garden of Forking Paths," Moulthrop uses the labyrinth as the metaphor to explain aspects of hypertext and the garden as a map for his novel. 

Writing a decade after Bolter's book and the two hypertext novels were published, philosopher and hypertext author David Kolb offers a pragmatic perspective that draws on architecture and city planning, specifying that space "can be treated as a collection of points and geometric relations" and place as "locations where we define significant regions, relations, and transitions . . . with a social net that defines possibilities of meaning and action."