StretchText

StretchText (also called stretchtext, stretch-text) is a hypertext feature that has not gained mass adoption in systems like the World Wide Web, but gives more control to the reader in determining what level of detail to read at. Authors write content to several levels of detail in a work.

StretchText is similar to outlining, however instead of drilling down lists to greater detail, the current node is replaced with a newer node. This ‘stretching’ to increase the amount of writing, or contracting to decrease it gives the feature its name. This is analogous to zooming in to get more detail.

Ted Nelson coined the term c. 1967.^[1]^[2]

The idea has also been developed to work with other media than text alone, for example as stretchfilm.^[3]

Conceptually, StretchText is similar to existing hypertexts system where a link provides a more descriptive or exhaustive explanation of something, but there is a key difference between a link and a piece of StretchText. A link completely replaces the current piece of hypertext with the destination, whereas StretchText expands or contracts the content in place. Thus, the existing hypertext serves as context.

Usage in electronic literature

Stretchtext has been used in electronic literature works including Pry, a novella written to be read on an iPad,^[4] Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991)^[5] and Morrisey's The Jew's Daughter (1998), which Mark Bernstein has called "perhaps the most artistically successful stretchtext fiction".^[5]

References

^ Landow, George P. (2006). Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization (3rd. ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins university press. p. 93-98. ISBN 978-0-8018-8257-9.
^ Wardrip-Fruin, Noah (August 9, 2004). "What hypertext is". Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. HYPERTEXT '04. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. p. 127. doi:10.1145/1012807.1012844. ISBN 978-1-58113-848-1. Nelson next presents a type of hypermedia called the "hypergram" ("a performing or branching picture") followed by another form of hypertext — "stretchtext." Nelson writes: "This form of hypertext is easy to use without getting lost… There are a screen and two throttles. The first throttle moves the text forward and backward, up and down on the screen. The second throttle causes changes in the writing itself: throttling toward you causes the text to become longer by minute degrees." Note that Nelson referred to hypertext as "forms of writing which branch or perform on request." Discrete hypertext uses links to branch on request. Stretchtext uses no links — instead making a non-branching performance.
^ Fagerjord, Anders (September 6, 2005). "Editing Stretchfilm: ( The full text HTML files for this article are fully compatible with the following browsers: Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari )". Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. HYPERTEXT '05. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. p. 301. doi:10.1145/1083356.1089507. ISBN 978-1-59593-168-9.
^ Przybyszewska, Agnieszka (2016). "Więcej niż książka, więcej niż film, więcej niż gra. O czytaniu (?) Pry". Sztuka Edycji. Studia Tekstologiczne i Edytorskie (in Polish). 10 (2): 107. doi:10.12775/SE.2016.024. ISSN 2391-7903.
^ ^a ^b Bernstein, Mark (June 29, 2009). "On hypertext narrative". Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. HT '09. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. p. 11. doi:10.1145/1557914.1557920. ISBN 978-1-60558-486-7. Moulthrop's Victory Garden includes a long stretchtext passage. Morrisey's "The Jew's Daughter" [35] is perhaps the most artistically successful stretchtext fiction, though it is not a hypertext; see also [36] and Ian M Lyon's "TextStretcher" [28].