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Digital Literacy in Story Spaces
Rebecca Luce-Kapler, Queen’s University
We are accustomed to using oral narratives and print texts to make sense of our
experience and develop an emerging story where one event seems to arise from another like
links in a chain. In fact, we often speak of narrative and print texts as “linear.” However, a
closer investigation indicates otherwise. Carol Shields has characterized narrative as a
“subjunctive cottage.” She writes:
A narrative isn’t something you pull along like a toy train, a perpetually thrusting
indicative. It’s this little subjunctive cottage by the side of the road. All you have to do
is open the door and walk in. (2000, p. 54)
One could point to many or most literary texts where the description of “linear” is not
appropriate. However, because we are able to take the details, what Brooks (1984) calls “the
metonymies” and build them into a sense of meaning, an overall “metaphor” that we call story,
this sense of connectedness and significance helps us believe that one detail follows another.
This process is how we have learned to engage with literary texts in this culture and even from
the most challenging, we usually can develop a coherent sense of our experience with the
reading.
But what happens to those skills and practices when we are faced with a hyperfiction
story in a digital environment—a story where the reader must actively engage in the
construction of the reading by choosing and clicking on links that build a path of text and
image? In this paper, I want to describe two instances of such an event from the context of a
larger study of digital literacy where my colleague, Teresa Dobson, and I are working with
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adolescents and education students, asking them to read and write in a variety of digital
environments. My focus today is a comparison of two readings of Patchwork Girl—that done
by two teenagers in contrast to that done by three education students. Considering their
responses to this process, I want to suggest, reveals some ways we might approach the teaching
of digital literacy skills. But first a short overview of Patchwork Girl created by Shelley
Jackson as a satirical feminist reading of Frankenstein.
The premise of the tale is that the Orkney Island disposal of the female monster,
referred to in Frankenstein, is a staged death, a way of liberating both monster and creator from
the constraints facing a nineteenth century woman. Jackson’s interactive novel is a clever
parody that combines image and text to tell the story of a female monster, one created not by
Victor Frankenstein, but by Mary Shelley. The image of the stitched-together monster,
reminiscent of the homunculus, greets one at the entrance of the text and ultimately becomes a
symbol both of the narrative of the female monster and the meta-narrative whereby the text
discusses its creation. There are three narrative lines that describe the monster’s love affair
with its mother, its sea voyage to America and its buying of an identity in California in a
struggle to keep parts together. Two metafictive threads trace the voice of the text and criticism
from a variety of sources as part of Jackson’s “patch” writing. In the title page, these five
options are offered in terms of ways to proceed: graveyard, journal, quilt, story, and broken
accents. These paths diverge and converge, and it is therefore unlikely that any two individuals
will experience the same reading. The hyperfiction, like the monster, is stitched together, its
ruptures plainly visible (Dobson & Luce-Kapler, in press).
When asking both groups of readers to engage with Patchwork Girl, we gave minimal
direction, primarily pointing out some of the features of the software. They were then invited
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to read as they would. A sample of our interview questions, asked after the reading, indicate
the expectations we had for their process:
1. Show me how you began reading the text.
2. How did you make decisions about how to proceed?
3. Did you develop a strategy in reading this text?
The responses to the third question are the ones that drew my attention because it was here
where I noticed the greatest difference between our teenage and young adult readers.
The teacher candidates, it is worth noting, were all English majors well versed in
reading and critiquing print literature. Their strategies, to a large extent, revealed this history
such as Joanne’s comment:
Even when I was reading a story, it didn’t read like a story to me. It didn’t feel like
things were going places at first . . . I found myself getting frustrated at some of the
ridiculous situations that they ended up in because they were really such
wonderfully developed characters that they could be put in, I think, situations in which
the possibility for development of the story would be much richer.
To begin to make sense of the text, Joanne learned that StorySpace, the software program that
created Patchwork Girl, would save her readings within a window called “history.” This
decision helped her feel like she was reading a coherent story and she notes:
Eventually, though, one day . . .I started reading “a journal.”
And partway through I got a bit more interested in it because
I started to see where things were going . . . . That
was also when I found out that the creator or scientist is
supposed to be Mary Shelley . . . and so that was when I sort
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of got curious. When she mentioned her husband Percy, I
was like ‘oh, okay, now I know what is going on,’ and then I
got curious as to where it was going because I’ve read
Frankenstein and I’ve always really liked Mary Shelley.
While her experience of print literature does help her find meaning at times, it can also
interfere with her process as she describes her search for a beginning, middle and end:
I got very excited last night because I finally got to one
where I clicked on the page and nothing happened. I thought,
‘I’ve reached the end.’ Now I can go and find a new thing,
but when I . . . clicked on this links thing, really what it was
a choice of going in two different directions . . . I still
haven’t reached the end. . .
Like Joanne, Ann drew on her experience with print literature. She talked about how
she was a “linear reader.” She admitted that she was so used to reading books that not having
pages to turn confused her. “I would just open it up and click on the first thing I saw,” she said,
“and then follow the links through the boxes.” She talked about how it seemed to be “fiction
that’s kind of just thrown out.” Nevertheless, she did develop strategies upon which she could
draw. “It’s almost like I compared it to reading a mystery novel where you’ve got all these
different clues and some of them link together and some of the don’t,” she said. “So you just
have to read each piece. I had to stop trying to connect things together and just enjoy the
subtleties of each piece of writing.”
While she found a way to read the hyperfiction so that she felt some satisfaction, her
sense of what should be emerging still arose from a print literature perspective.
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Troy, who recognized that a different paradigm might be needed for Patchwork Girl,
described the hyperfiction as “more like a video game . . . rather than a text, or like a movie,
because . . . you want read the manual before you read.” The manual, he felt, gave the effect of
knowing the whole. He described how the structure of the work as he saw it, was a metaphor
for the text. “I really like these, where she has the different people that she took this stuff from.
I really enjoyed that part because it would sort of disembody them, while it created a new body
of text.” But, because of his focus on narrative, he ultimately did not find the text satisfying—
at least not in the way he thinks of reading novels because he mentioned how it is impossible to
fall into the continuous dream of a story. He compared the experience to reading choose-yourown-adventure novels where he would read the same material over and over again. “You’d go
back to the same thing you’d already read,” he said, “and you just skip it to go to the choice.
So it was kind of just pointless after awhile to go back and back and back and you just get
frustrated.”
While it was clear that our participants were using specific strategies in reading
Patchwork Girl, it was also clear that those approaches were not successful for them to the
usual degree. In some instances, too, it seemed that they might even be hindering the
understanding of the hyperfiction. What then of our adolescent readers?
It was in comparing the transcripts where I found a hinge which exemplified for me the
difference in the readings. I had just read several lines from Joanne’s transcript that said this
about Patchwork Girl:
I find she’s very stream of consciousness which is
something that I like if it is done really well. I just don’t
particularly like the way that she does it. . . .The other
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challenge I really found was very little dialogue. It’s not
usually a huge problem for me, but I don’t feel like anyone’s
talking to each other and it all seems so very cerebral. . . . I just
find the story felt very fragmented as well. I found it
very had to make connections, and she seemed to almost
jump from situation to situation and there was very little
transition.
A few moments later, turning to the adolescent transcripts, I read what Stevie said in
referring to how the hyperfiction made sense to her:
I think it works because the whole story is thoughts
basically. . . . I know that my thoughts . . . bounce
from one thing to another so I think it’s . . . almost
a stream-of-consciousness. It’s like a written portrait
of the human mind almost.
Whereas Joanne had seen the stream-of-consciousness quality from a literary critic
perspective, Stevie had seen the form as suggesting something different from a typical narrative
and as representative of consciousness. Such a perspective could not be attributed to lack of
experience with print texts because both Stevie and Mirth (the adolescents chose their own
pseudonyms) were top English students in high school and both read and wrote extensively.
For instance, Stevie told us that she had written several novels for her own enjoyment and
Mirth had recently finished reading Stone Angel, which he spent some time discussing with me
at a sophisticated level.
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I felt that perhaps their different response to the hyperfiction was a result of strategies
that they were using, different from those of the older participants, and indeed that seemed to
be the case. For instance, both Stevie and Mirth initially checked out and then used the
structure of Patchwork Girl to facilitate their engagement with the text. Stevie described how
she would use the chart view to get a sense of underlying connections. She told me that she
“began looking at all the big parts” to organize her reading, using the colours of boxes, the
names of sections, and the links. For instance, she noted that in the chart view, she was
focussing first on the red boxes because she thought they had a certain importance to them in
regards to the character or plot of the story. She also discovered that the text shifted in font size
according to character, explaining that the creator’s font was larger than Patchwork Girl’s. She
offers this theory:
I guess that way you could easily tell who’s talking . . .
I mean sometimes there are books written and they’ll
be in first person but there’s three characters and sometimes
the font is different. . . . this is obvious ‘my heart belongs
to Agatha’, you can understand who is talking.
Mirth also used structural cues. He began the reading by opening up all the little coloured
boxes in the crazy quilt sections. He explained that “it makes more sense then just all the boxes
everywhere. . . . It shows how things progress” and alerted him if he was heading toward what
he called a “dead-ender.” He also noted that he used the arrows in the map view to plan the
directions of his reading. He compared the story to a “labyrinth” but without “the yarn to
remember where you’ve been.” Instead he explained that he had to “take all the little bits” and
“put them together somewhere,” meaning his memory. He indicated the importance of
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remembering in this type of reading adding that “one needed that in regular novels too. “They
need to remember where they’ve been,” he said. “But in this it’s even more so . . . unless you
want to read the same thing over and over again.”
Both Stevie and Mirth were much more comfortable with the ambiguity of the
hyperfiction than were the older readers. Stevie believed that “it’s good because it doesn’t
come with instructions. Because if it came with [them], I’d be worried all the time . . . ‘am I
reading this right? Am I reading it in the right order?’” She added that this did not mean that
she thought there was no order to the piece but that there was more than one way to read it to
make sense.
Mirth observed that it felt like there was more freedom than what he called a “normal
novel” because he has more choice in what happens. He felt it was almost like role-playing,
comparing it to some computer games as well as pen and paper ones like Dungeons and
Dragons.
Both adolescents felt that the hyperfiction allowed for a greater range of readers and
reading skills and that it would challenge some of the traditional approaches in the English
classroom. Mirth noted that in class they were usually told to read a novel to a certain point
and then discuss what had been read. If his class read Patchwork Girl, he imagined the teacher
having to say, “Well, I’m not really sure what you read with this . . .”. He suggested that
“Different people would have a different experience from what they read and if they all shared,
they could get a better idea of what had happened.”
Stevie observed that students would need only a basic understanding of how to navigate
through the text and “beyond that,” she said, “I think that if they were let loose, they’d like it
because it’s a different way of reading. . . . and some people have different ways of learning so
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it might bring that out in them more . . . it’s good for any kind of learner or reader that you
happen to put in front of the screen.”
Just as an aside, later in the study, when the two were introduced to writing with
StorySpace, some of the very features that they observed and used in reading Patchwork Girl
were ones they employed in structuring and developing their own stories, making the explicit
connections between them in their interviews and underscoring again, the importance of both
reading and writing in particular forms.
In considering the differences between the two groups of readers, I am reminded of
Alice van der Klei who suggests that we think of “our ‘being and becoming’ as a process—
even a game—of differences, where the ‘reader,’ rather than attending to concepts or to what is
being forgotten in the transfer, thinks about being caught up in a stimulating scattering of
creation.” She asks, “Do we perhaps linger too much on the text and its concepts, having the
habits of the ‘monastic archiving reader’?” She offers the notion of “reader-creator” instead
(2002, p. 54). I would submit that this reader-creator needs to come to hyperfiction able to both
use and revise literary skills as necessary.
Espen Aarseth, who has given close attention to the process of reading what he calls
“cybertexts,” suggests that instead of interpretation, we think of such reading as a process of
intervention and personal improvisation. He warns against applying theories of literary
criticism to new fields without reassessment of terms and concepts. At the same time, he points
to the problems of describing the new as radically different from the old. His explanation is
reminiscent of Bolter’s description of “remediation” (2001) where we can see evidence that
each shift of writing technology from the papyrus roll to the computer has been characterized
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by a newer medium taking prominence over an older one while borrowing and reorganizing
previous forms.
Aarseth focuses our attention on the mechanical organization of the text, suggesting that
the intricacies of the medium are an integral part of the literary exchange. In addition to the
work a reader performs mentally, with cybertexts, she or he must perform in an “extranoematic
sense” (p. 1), a selective process that is a physical construction. Such texts Aarseth calls
“ergodic” from the Greek words ergon, meaning work and hodos, meaning path. Ergodic
literature includes not only cybertexts but other forms such as the ancient Chinese text, I
Ching.
As our adolescent readers explained, knowing how to recognize the tools within the text
to do the required work, being prepared to improvise and role-play, and learning to live with
ambiguity are all skills they (and their teachers) should be prepared to bring to cybertexts.
Furthermore, I believe we need to foster an understanding of hyperfiction as a complex process
with an ever emerging and shifting sense of meaning where not only is the reader different each
time she or he returns to the text but the text itself changes as some nodes are read and others
are missed.
We can perhaps take our direction from Shelley Jackson and her poetic reflection on the
text within Patchwork Girl:
I will follow the paths and dispense with the scenery. I will
be pure particulate flow, an electronic speedster gunning it
through a cloud chamber, a quantum sky-diver. My hair flies
out behind me, the skin on my face pulls taut and my clothes
wrestle around me, as I drive my n/arrow nose through the
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sky! Yes, or I’m the bust of a maiden on the prow of a ship, leaning into the next
moment, my back to the life on board.
(Now I’m not sure which I am: a squatter in abandoned moments, or headlight outside
the broken window, blurring into a solid line.)
(1995, flow)
References
Aarseth, E.J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature.
Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University.
Bolter, J. (2001). Writing space: The computer, hypertext, and the
history of writing, 2nd ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Brooks, P. (1984). Reading for the plot: Design and invention in
narrative. New York: Knopf.
Dobson, T., & Luce-Kapler, R. (in press). Stitching texts: Gender and
geography in Frankenstein and Patchwork Girl.
Jackson, S. (1995). Patchwork Girl: A modern monster. [Hypertext
software]. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems.
Shields, C. (2000). Ilk in Dressing up for the carnival (pp. 53-60).
Toronto: Random House.
van der Klei, A. (2002). Repeating the rhizome. SubStance, 31(1),
48-55.
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