Hooked on Hypertext: the Spirit Trouts Collective
By Christa Starr
Created in 1995, the Spirit Trouts page (jefferson.village.virginia.edu/spirit_trouts)
is a product of the University of Virgina's Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities course "Discourse Networks,"
an early foray into the difficulties of conveying various types of
information via the World Wide Web. The entry page for the Spirit
Trouts Collective is simple, a plain background and a few bits of
text, not necessarily forming a coherent sentence. With no preliminary
information as to the page's intentions, I started surfing in my normal
style, which is to follow a link on the main page for a level or two,
then return to the main page and follow another link. The Spirit Trouts
site is definitely the wrong place to do this.
This site is actually a collection of several students' disparate
experiments in the then-young arena of hypertext. Some of the works
have similar themes, but many do not, so visiting the opening few
pages of each left me frustratedly trying to determine just what the
web site was all about. I started wondering if there were some big
joke I wasn't in on, some reason why the art form of postcards was
being invoked in an essay on the implications of Rita Hayworth's sex
symbol status. Further confusing things was a link in the center of
the main page, which had been coded to randomly pick from all the
pages in the site, so every once in a while I would wind up in the
middle of a story about a bench or find a letter written from a man
in prison to his wife. I spent a good while trying to make sense of
it as a whole, becoming very confused by what appeared to be an incoherent
jumble of unrelated pages. I eventually turned to my favorite search
engine Google (www.google.com)
for backup. After finding a course schedule for Discourse Networks
class and the final class project, I finally realized that each link
on the main page was meant to be followed and explored separately.
Taken that way, the site became much less frustrating to navigate.
I was able to examine the individual works and enjoy their diversity.
I was still somewhat disconcerted by the lack of fictional/non-fictional
clues. Some of the works were obviously scholarly essays, like the
piece on Rita Hayworth. On the other side, a piece about an antique
bench very clearly marked itself as a narrative. Several, however,
seemed to fall in-between, and it was tough to tell if they were meant
as article or story. Currently, one of the most difficult aspects
of doing research on the Web is establishing the accuracy of a source.
Some of the Spirit Trouts experiments, like the beautiful postcard
exploration which had links solely through the antique-looking images
and never through the accompanying text, could conceivably have been
taken from actual vintage correspondence. Or it could have been fictional.
Without clear reference to outside works or other standard methods
of framing a scholarly article, there was simply no way to tell.
My favorite piece was an essay exploring the notion of photographic
objectivity. It seemed to most closely resemble the current flavor
of hypertext on the Web. Each page contained links at the bottom not
only back to the Spirit Trouts main site but also to the hypertext's
own main page. Links were clearly defined and wove a logical path
through the information being conveyed. I never felt lost or disconcerted,
and was presented with enough references to check on the information,
photographs, and quotes if I so chose.
However, I can't help wondering if I was just more comfortable dealing
with this piece than some of the more experimental texts because of
its familiar nature. The goal of Spirit Trouts was to play with hypertext,
to explore the emerging medium and its many possibilities for communication.
And even though it often conflicts with the 'standard' method of writing
of hypertext that has emerged since 1995, there are still many thought-provoking
possibilities in Spirit Trouts that aspiring web designers and writers
would do well to investigate.